


The Long Road (Recovery in Wakanda)

by thatbluenote



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Longing, M/M, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Only very very tiny Infinity War spoilers, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Steve Rogers, Past Mind Control, Post-Black Panther (2018), Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Slow Burn, Wakanda
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 01:24:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14509443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatbluenote/pseuds/thatbluenote
Summary: Bucky Barnes emerges from cryo in Wakanda, but even after the success of Shuri’s treatment, it’s clear there’s more work to be done. Most importantly, he is determined to prove the words from the red book no longer have the power to trigger the Winter Soldier.And there’s only one person on earth he trusts enough to speak those words to him.(Post Civil War, pre Infinity War Part 1.)





	1. The Call

**Author's Note:**

> Letitia Wright spoke in an interview about how Shuri would have healed Bucky Barnes in Wakanda (http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/the-avengers/news/a855252/avengers-infinity-war-shuri-winter-soldier-bucky-healing/) with a combination of specialized medical techniques, elder wisdom, and healing far away from things that might trigger him. This is inspired by that, and by my need to grapple with slash explain that terribly brief greeting in IW.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the phone buzzes, Steve is 20,000 feet in the air above the Tajikistan Pamirs and nearly spills his lunch across the cockpit.

When the phone buzzes, Steve is 20,000 feet in the air above the Tajikistan Pamirs and nearly spills his lunch across the cockpit. He spies Nat giving him a look as he grabs for his chopsticks gracelessly.

The quinjet has a radio and satellite for the usual encrypted communications, but for as long as they’ve been in exile together, two burner phones have cluttered up the comms console. One is in case Tony calls, and the other...well, the other burner can only mean one thing.

Steve just stares at it.

“You’d better get that.” Natasha’s voice does not betray the same relief that Steve can feel coursing through his veins like quicksilver.

“Yeah,” he finally manages. His mouth goes dry as he answers it.

“Captain Rogers, it’s Shuri. It is time.”

He doesn’t have to say anything to Nat because she is already adjusting their flight path to head south.

 

Birnin Zana at sunrise glitters under a canopy of mist when Nat pilots the jet through Wakanda’s barrier shields and down to a smooth landing. As on his previous visit, Steve is struck by the unfamiliar shapes of this place, its radial geometries and the rounded spires of high-rise buildings, so unlike the lines and angles of New York City he knew from his youth. So clean.

“Welcome to the Golden City,” Ayo says in greeting when they descend from the quinjet. She stands flanked by two Dora Milaje, and her regal bearing is as fierce as Steve remembers from their first encounter. He notices her formal nod to Natasha. “Captain Rogers, Shuri asked me to conduct you to her laboratory. We must make haste.”

Steve tries to calm his heartbeat. It could be progress. It could be something worse. But when Natasha steps forward to join them, Ayo shakes her head stiffly. “I am afraid you cannot join us at this initial meeting, Ms. Romanoff. There are...special circumstances.”

Natasha’s face is unreadable, but her eyes meet Steve’s and they exchange a wordless moment of understanding.

“In fact, King T’Challa asked to speak to you, Ms. Romanoff.” Ayo gestures with a nod and the Dora Milaje step forward to lead Natasha to the palace building just beyond the landing pad. The tall woman looks at him before striding in the direction of Shuri’s laboratory, saying only over her shoulder, “Follow me, Captain.”

 

Steve curses the delay of the decontamination airlock at the medical lab, which smells briefly of ozone while ultraviolet lights scan down his body. Through the thick glass of the door, he can see Shuri adjusting the controls on a tablet, her brow furrowed as she studies a complicated display of vital signs. Brain scans. Bucky’s _mind_.

He tries not to think _Where is Bucky_ and waits for the decontamination scan to complete.

Shuri tosses him a sly grin when he finally steps into the lab. Her braids twist up into twin spirals on top of her head and a stylus is tucked behind one ear. “Captain Rogers,” she says in greeting, and he tries not to read too much into her obvious good mood. He can tell with one look that Bucky’s not here, which dampens the feeling that had been simmering inside ever since they landed. It was too much to hope for, perhaps.

“It’s just Steve, please.”

“Okay, _Just Steve_ ,” she says, her voice dripping with the kind of light-hearted sarcasm that reminds him she is only a teenager, after all. A phenomenal, genius teenager, but still a teenager. She beckons him closer, grabs the stylus from behind her ear and taps on a three-dimensional model of brain tissue, zooming in again and again. The model rotates, dizzyingly complex. Steve sees seething, pulsing networks of what look almost like neurons, but judging by the scale of the model they seem too large for that. These are more like nodes of...something. Some of them knot and entwine in dense, angry patches, thick as scar tissue, others are strung out and attached only by anemic little filaments. Light zips along the nodes in stuttering, repeating flashes, like miniature lightning caught in a loop.

“This is what I brought you here to see,” she says with satisfaction, tapping the screen. She checks her watch with a small frown, distracted for a moment.

“You’re going to have to help me out a little…”

“Steve, this is why it’s time to wake up your friend.” She makes an adjustment on her tablet and as he watches, the nodes and filaments transform. Instead of a fibrous tangle, everything loosens and settles into a more harmonious, even pattern, light pulsing slower, without those strange repeating loops. Shuri watches with satisfaction, nodding as it changes.

He can only turn to her, shocked silent for a moment, eyes wide. “You...so soon...you figured out how to treat him?” He had been prepared to wait decades, again, if necessary, when T’Challa offered Bucky sanctuary here, but it has been less than a year. Seven months, if he’s counting. (He’s counting.)

Shuri concentrates on her tablet as she continues to manipulate the complex image glowing before them. “Well, what you’re looking at is step one in a process. It took me quite some time to pinpoint and map the neural damage. As you know, your friend’s case is...special. There is a combination of laser-pulse treatments and cellular infusions that we have used with success in the past, but we needed a better neural model to work from. I’ve been running simulations for _months_ , ever since--”

“Shuri, is this real?”

She looks up, amused and annoyed. “What do you mean, real? Why wouldn’t it be?”

“No, I mean...these images...is this one of your simulations?” He needs to know for sure, because a thread of hope still lingers somewhere in him.

“These are real scans, Steve. My team has been treating him in his suspended state for the past month. This is Bucky’s brain you’re looking at. His progress. It’s time to move on to the next part of the recovery protocol.”

Steve just regards her blankly, absorbing, pulse slowing. That quicksilver feeling is back.

Her teeth flash white in a wide smile and she walks over to the door that leads to an adjoining laboratory space. “Come on, slowpoke. He’ll be awake in a few minutes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Planning for 4 to 6 chapters, I think. So, not the slowest of slow burns, but slow enough. Rating will probably change.


	2. Awakening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not easy waking up to find out your cure has only just started.

Bucky sleeps under a pale green woven blanket, but not a regular sleep -- the carefully positioned, neutral pose of someone unconscious and placed just so by nurses and aides. From the doorway, Steve simply looks and tries to absorb the idea of Bucky being awake soon. Wonders how certain Shuri is that her treatments have worked.

The room looks nothing like a hospital. Aside from the plain bed, it contains only a wicker chair, and the windows are covered in gauzy curtains that only admit a dim light. He has to peer closely to see the rise and fall of Bucky’s chest as he breathes. No prosthetic arm. 

Steve expected to find him restrained, or wired up to machines, but Shuri whispers to him, “This is part of the protocol. No need for it to be so sterile, and always attended by family--well,” she amends, looking at him apologetically, “someone he knows very well.”

“He doesn’t always know me.”

She doesn’t reply to this, only nods to the chair. “Stay here. The room is unmonitored, if he asks. Our protocols say this stage must happen only gradually, and with great trust. I’ll explain more later. Any moment now…” Then she exits, noiselessly shutting the door to the other room.

Sitting in the chair in the hushed silence of the room, next to the quiet bed that holds his friend, Steve is at a loss. “Buck?” he whispers. There is no reply.

He looks closer at Bucky’s arm atop the blanket near him. His skin is pale but that perfect, familiar shade of olive, still muscled but in such a state of relaxation. Bucky’s fingers against the blanket are so familiar that Steve closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment. 

Minutes pass, and nothing. His breath speeds up a little bit, sure that something is amiss in Shuri’s mysterious protocol. Waiting like this reminds him too closely of too many bedside vigils during the war, concussions and comas, shock and sepsis, friends gone in their sleep.  _ Isn’t he supposed to be awake by now? _ The thought cascades a cold fear down his spine.

He let himself give in to it, the smallest part of the panic, _if nothing else, let me have this,_ and slides his hand down to grip Bucky’s.

And then Bucky awakes. Eyelids blinking open, gaze lulled.

Turns his head a fraction toward Steve, just enough to lock eyes with him. The moment suspends, unreal. Bucky’s lips part as if to speak, though his movements are slowed from his long sleep. 

Steve is elated. All he wants is to hear the word caught on Bucky’s lips. Bucky stirs, trying again, and moistens his lips with his tongue, mouth curling into something like a smile, like a private joke unspoken between them.

At that second, Steve becomes hyper-aware of his hand still holding Bucky’s. Self-conscious, a moment so heady he might fall forward into the gravity of it. Because Bucky is awake, alive.  _ Right _ ? Maybe that’s what pins him in place for a second longer than necessary.

Then Steve smiles too wide and stands up, letting go, slipping into formality as if it can hide everything. “Welcome back, Bucky.”

 

Shuri knocks and enters, followed by an aide bearing a tray. “Good morning, Sergeant Barnes. On the day of your awakening, our tradition is to feast with the family! I wasn’t sure how you would feel about my mother’s best  _ Isophu _ , so I asked the chef to make something special for you.” On the tray is a steaming dish that smells tantalizingly of chicken pot pie, with place settings for both men. 

Bucky tries to take it all in. Even after an hour of quiet, private conversation, Steve still stands with stiff posture some distance from the bed. Before Shuri came in, while they talked, Bucky had waited and waited for the shocks of adrenaline that he expected. But none came. Something has changed.

Not everything, though. Still the same old ghosts of the past confusing everything between him and Steve, unspoken as always. There had been a moment when Bucky swore he saw a fleeting expression in those familiar blue eyes; a wordless curiosity that Bucky had wanted so many times to believe was  _ want _ . Steve clutching onto his fingers for longer than he realized, before he retreated behind the veil of polite chatter. 

He has so many questions and Steve can only answer some of them, so eventually Shuri had returned with the food, with information, with infectious pride in her treatment.  _ See _ , she says quietly to Steve,  _ I told you _ . 

No matter how many different ways Bucky tests his reflexes, everything seems normal. Shuri says there are no drugs in his system, though certainly anesthesia was used during the treatment. After his second question about this, she disappears into her lab for a while to let them eat, nonchalantly leaving her tablet on the foot of his bed. He uses the opportunity to scan through his medical records, not caring about Steve’s noises of protest. He needs to know. 

She’s not lying. But neither is she telling the complete truth. “So when can I leave?” he asks when she returns.

Her dark brown eyes regard him gravely. “Ah. Well, there is still much work to be done.”

“I thought you weren’t going to wake me up until I was fixed.” He can feel agitation stirring inside him,  _ there it is,  _ familiar as an old friend. He tries not to glare at Steve, fails. He kicks himself for trusting that anything could be so easy. Bucky leans against the wall so that he has a clear line of escape to the door. 

Shuri cuts an eye his way. “Listen. I may be good, but this isn’t magic, Sergeant Barnes.” He can see her watching him prepare to run; can see her letting him see it. “Tell me...do you think an injury has healed simply because the skin no longer bleeds? And how long do you think you can go on abusing a wound before it takes longer and longer to heal?”  _ Or longer and longer to wipe _ , he thinks. He doesn’t want to remember what he knows about how that works, though the knowledge of it lingers somewhere inside, like a tremor underground. 

Shuri turns to the tablet and rapidly flicks through several screens. “Captain Rogers, perhaps you can persuade him. We need to keep treating your friend if he wants to fully recover. An old man in his fragile condition can’t just run around.” She smirks, addressing Steve only but daring Bucky to take the bait.

Bucky huffs in silent annoyance. The unbelievable nerve of this kid.

But her expression turns serious and urgent now. “Steve...the neural infusion, the progress I showed you on the scan? All that is merely a stopgap, a bandaid. It will all go away if he goes back to regular life right now.” She says this in a hush as if Bucky isn’t standing just four feet away, listening to every word and watching the small muscles in Steve’s jaw tense as he takes in her meaning.

Steve looks at him, and in his eyes is a kind of fatigue Bucky has rarely seen there. A fear of something. Of  _ him _ , he realizes, and it makes his stomach go sour.

Shuri taps away at her pad again and then giggles and swears under her breath a little. “If you even knew the kinds of dirty jokes Agent Romanoff makes at your expense, Captain...she sends word that she’s ready with the quinjet in case someone…” she does not even glance up at Bucky, “needs to go somewhere...”

“He’s not going anywhere,” Steve says firmly. He gives Bucky a look of warning. The fear is gone:  _ don’t fuck this up _ . 

What if he has no choice?

 

“Maybe we should’ve asked Loki,” Bucky whispers to Steve as they follow Shuri down a long corridor. “He would’ve fixed me faster.”

Steve only gives him a wide-eyed look of consternation, then sobers.

“What?” Bucky finally prods him after they’ve walked side by side a ways further.

“That’s the first joke you’ve made, Buck,” Steve replies, and the curve of his cheek moves in that familiar way, hiding a smile.

Shuri opens the door to a comfortable suite of rooms looking out on the gardens behind the royal palace. “We keep these family quarters available for those recovering from my team’s special neurological treatments...I know it’s a lot of space for you, Sergeant, but it will give you some freedom.” She shows them a few features of the room, particularly the privacy and security features, and the fully stocked kitchen. “Most of those who are under my treatment for one reason or another have reason to...require privacy,” she says amiably. “Better not to leave the grounds,” she adds, showing him a console where food can be reordered.

Bucky tries not to linger on the memories of how many impersonal, blank-slate apartments he has been through, squatting or surveilling for a few days then moving on. There’s something different about this one, though. “Is that…” he tilts his head, looking through a doorway at one of the bedrooms in confusion.

“Yes, usually the family arrives early with special things to make it feel cozy, but in your case...I found some things on eBay.” Bucky walks up to a large framed poster on the wall beside the window. The poster displays an expansive skyline of New York as it was, long ago, the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground, those elegant cathedral arches just like he remembers. On the bed, too, striped sheets and pillowcases like he hasn’t seen since his army years, utterly different from the bright, modern Wakanda prints on the bed where he had first awoken. He’s overcome with a strange feeling--nostalgia and a terrible bright feeling uncomfortably close to  _ hope-- _ and turns to Steve grinning, confused.

The grin dies on his face. Steve is standing in the hallway, looking past the kitchen with that distracted look. He realizes that Shuri has not been addressing any of these instructions to Steve. The quinjet awaits.

All too soon, Shuri is ready to leave him there, and Bucky braces himself for another goodbye. 

“Where are you and Natasha--”

But Steve meets his look with clear-eyed steadiness and says at the same time, “I’ll be right here--Natasha? She’s probably halfway to Aleppo. She doesn’t need me for this one. I’ll be right here across the hall, Buck.”

His first night of real sleep, he lies in the dark waiting and listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the city outside the palace walls. He separates the layers of sound in his mind by habit, cataloguing them. The hum of quiet machinery somewhere deep beneath the building’s foundations. The musical calls of merchants in the night market. Rumbles of car engines, electric whine of battery-driven cars. Mingled murmurs in a mix of Xhosa and English outside when the sentries cross the grounds at regular intervals (six minutes, eighteen minutes, three minutes, repeat). Inside the living quarters, the rustle of bedclothes as Steve settles in for the night. 

Bucky quiets everything in his head in a way he has never been able to do before. He listens until he hears Steve sigh in his sleep, falling into a deeper slumber. 

Tomorrow he will have so many questions. Shuri has a schedule of treatment modalities, therapies both medical and uncanny. Shuri says he needs to sleep, to eat, to be. For the first time in his fucked up century of living, that seems like enough.  _ Your loved ones must help take care of you _ , Shuri explained, and, well. It almost sounds possible. He holds the idea lightly, on the edge of sleep, the edge of wanting  _ more _ lulled inside him for now.

Bucky breathes in and out in tandem with that regular soft tide of sound, and the best part of it is the almost inaudible sound of Steve, here. Staying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Xhosa Isophu recipe: https://www.mzansistylecuisine.co.za/isophu-yombona/


	3. Salt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky is not thrilled with a new treatment added to the protocol until he comes up with a possible solution.

The first week, Steve keeps waiting for something to go wrong, for Bucky to snap, but he doesn’t.

He still catches Bucky checking exits at the end of a long day, but it’s like a faded habit.

Sleep, rise, therapy, meditation, repeat. It reminds Steve of the army, the way a schedule frees your mind a little, though he worries for Bucky it might feel stifling. All he has to do is keep him here, right? So he accompanies him as far as the waiting room of every appointment, reads every book recommended, even sits down on the plush rug opposite him in the quiet of the living room to meditate every morning and every evening.

That one isn’t so easy. To close his eyes and breathe when Bucky sits right there in front of him, too much and not enough. He has to school his breath; he’s grateful for the discipline of practice. It keeps him from saying too much.

The second week, an alertness has returned to Bucky’s eyes and there’s an echo of that old familiar charm; Steve makes the mistake of letting himself be lulled by it.

The third week, he doesn’t see it coming.

 

“No. No.” Bucky’s eyes go blank and dull when they arrive. Steve places a cautionary hand on Bucky’s arm to stop him from bolting. Shit. Shuri never told him what to do if Bucky shut down like this.

To Steve’s eyes it looks much like every other Wakandan medical office or laboratory they’ve visited, though he can’t figure out why there’s a shower cubicle to one side and rubber drainage mats everywhere in the overly warm, humid room.

Then he sees the sign on the wall, the English translation posted in small letters beneath the Xhosa. Please shower and remove jewelry and prostheses before entering isolation tank.

The technician who arrives shortly after doesn’t seem to know what to do. She and Steve exchange a few words but all Steve can think about is that Bucky’s eyes are trained helplessly on the low, rounded door set into the wall. The entrance to the isolation tank. Steve can see his breath has gone from shallow to tight. He’s bracing for something.

“Bucky…?” Steve slowly walks in front of him, blocking his view of that door. The blue of Bucky’s eyes almost pale gray in the overhead light. “It’s safe here...she says you can control the whole thing. You can exit the tank at any--”

“I can’t--this is what--” His eyes flicker manically around the room like he’s struggling to remember. Steve panics a tiny bit at that, pictures those nodes and maps of memory slowly strangling Bucky’s brain again.

Steve tries again, treading carefully. Fuck the hydrotherapy, he just needs Bucky to calm down. “Remember the meditations?” Bucky finally meets his eyes for a moment.

But he looks away and the agitation still hovers in him. “That’s--that’s different. You--”

Okay, no meditations. Steve swears under his breath. Keep it simple. “Remember the breathing? Remember, Bucky?” Steve’s voice breaks a little on his name, realizing this isn’t going to work. “Please. You have to try.”  
Bucky stills. Won’t look at him. Just says, “I’ll do it if you come in the tank with me.”

Steve is taken aback. He had only meant to calm him enough to get them safely back to the apartment. He looks to the technician, who wordlessly opens a cabinet near the shower stall. She sets two pairs of swim briefs on top of a stack of towels and then she departs with a nod of acknowledgment.

 

The tank is surprisingly spacious beyond the low door. When it finally opens, Bucky watches as Steve ducks inside and steps into the shallow water a little ways. The light inside the tank glows indigo blue and Steve’s skin appears almost black by contrast.

Bucky doesn’t want to recall the other times, or more precisely, doesn’t want to think about why he can’t recall the other times. Yet it scared him so badly at first sight that he froze, scrabbling for purchase again in what had been a landscape of calm.

This place is pristine, but the faint salt smell evokes the barest hint of a memory he can just grasp the edges of. Someplace wretched and brackish and maddeningly indistinct. Someplace lost in darkness but, oh God, choked with the taste of fear gone fetid, rotted into something closer to _longing_.

The thought shocks him just before Steve turns around with a puzzled look. “You done staring at my ass, Buck? Come on, you’re shivering. It’s much warmer in here.”

 

Steve waits until he is ready, really ready. Watches him with something like relief when Bucky finally lays back into the buoyancy of the salt. The indigo light washes over Steve’s face and from his floating position, Bucky can only see him as a dark shape against the water. He won’t look away until Steve leans back and his limbs come to rest oddly on the surface. There’s so much salt in the water that it feels slippery and utterly unlike floating in regular water.

He has to grit his teeth a moment at the familiarity. Bucky only wants to breathe, to try.

The water shifts under him like a bed, or perhaps he only feels ripples against his skin. It’s unearthly and not completely relaxing, not even when he starts to successfully pace and steady and slow his breathing, but it is quiet, and Steve is right there.

They breathe, floating side by side. It’s nice, but their limbs bump gently into each other and it startles Bucky out of his concentration twice, badly. The second time, Bucky sits up in the water, unable to hold back a loud sigh of frustration, and comes to rest on the smooth surface of the bottom of the pool.

Steve clears his throat and looks over at him for a second. “Buck…”

“Sorry--” Bucky can barely see Steve’s eyes, tries to discern his reaction. _Don’t leave, you can’t leave_.

“No, just let me--” Steve moves closer to him in the water and then reaches over to put his arm in the crook of Bucky’s elbow.

Bucky looks down at it dumbly, thinking Steve is about to escort him out of the tank, and he feels like a stupid failure for liking the touch of Steve’s salt-wet skin on his own. It only means the conditioning has won out today, he thinks. Shuri will be sad.

But Steve doesn’t stand him up, he pushes at Bucky’s shoulder gently. “Lie back. Just trust me.”

Steve lies back down in the float tank too, his arm still through Bucky’s own, so now they’re floating side by side with linked arms.

Steve’s voice is a whisper, lulling him in the hush. “See? Now we don’t bump into each other. You ever seen otters in the zoo?”

“What?”

“Otters do this. They hold--paws when they sleep. So they don’t float away from each other.” Then Steve’s hand, warm and comforting, stirs from the surface of the water and drapes over Bucky's, solidifying the connection.

It’s about the strangest thing he can imagine. But he stays there, warm and quiet and held, just that little bit.

He can hear his own breath in the silence, and Steve’s. The same regular tide of breath he listens to during their meditations, and at night, but doubled somehow, richer, in the womb-like quiet.

Even in the warmth of the water, Bucky can still feel the different temperature of Steve’s skin against his. Time seems to stretch like taffy, unreliable, but in a blissful way. Like being tipsy but with adrenaline, awake and asleep.

It’s like they are a single thing, touching like that. He swears he can feel their pulses sync up.

When the soft chime of a timer goes off, Steve helps him to his feet slowly. They climb out and it is nothing at all like any memory Bucky can grasp onto. Something new entirely, to be held in the salt like that.

Bucky wonders if it was Steve’s heart or his own that he heard. A heartbeat singing in his ears, sped up, for the whole time they floated there, linked in the violet-blue darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Study on flotation/isolation tanks for anxiety and depression:  
> Feinstein, Khalsa, Yeh, Wohlrab, Simmons, Stein, et al. (2018) Examining the short-term anxiolytic and antidepressant effect of Floatation-REST. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0190292. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190292


	4. The Night Market

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It hadn’t been the night market. It had maybe been the color of the plum staining those lips.

Steve returns after a long run in the fading heat of the early evening, the sheen of sweat finally cooling him down when he steps into the cool of the apartment. It’s quiet here, and familiar after so long. Maybe too quiet.

The evening meditation had been too much for Steve earlier that day. Bucky was restless. Finally, they’d called it and Steve stepped out for a run, trying to burn off the energy that felt like it was going to eat him alive. No setbacks, recently. Does that mean he should go soon? Bucky doesn’t need as much close supervision these days, but Steve keeps putting off calling Natasha nonetheless. In the center of his chest was this thing like a magnet he carried around, and the more he tried to keep his distance from Bucky, tried to give him the space to recover and be normal, the stronger it pulled at him.

Meditation helped until it didn’t. Running helped, sometimes.

He walks through the apartment, wiping his face on the bottom of his shirt. In the living room, Bucky looks up from the middle of a nest of books. It’s a familiar spot for him. A tablet resting on top of the stack with messages from Shuri; an open notebook in his lap, the journal he’d taken up recently. But he’s not looking at any of it, he just stares idly at Steve’s sweat-drenched figure, then gazes out the windows again.

“Everything okay, Buck?”

Those startling blue eyes turn to Steve. “Just...I’m fuckin’ bored, Steve.” He actually cracks a smile.

Bucky swearing does something to the air, makes something shift. Steve watches him carefully but there’s no tension there. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. “I thought Shuri found something for you to work on.”

“The protocol documentation? Yeah, yeah.” He shifts restlessly on the floor, fiddles with the cuff of the empty long sleeve of his t-shirt by habit. “I’ve been helping in the lab in between appointments and stuff, but mainly listening to Shuri’s sh--” Steve clears his throat uncomfortably. “Uh, Shuri’s _music_. Lots of music playing in the lab. She wants me to hear all this stuff she says I missed out on. Calls it music therapy.” His eyes roll.

Steve chuckles a little at this. “Well, don’t sugarcoat it. She’s a big girl, her feelings won’t be hurt.”

Bucky gives him a look. “If you think I’m up for sugarcoating my words, you have a far higher opinion of this whole stupid thing than I do.”

“This ‘whole stupid thing’ is a damn miracle and you know it.”

Bucky only mangles one of the therapist’s favorite phrases in reply. “There are no miracles, Steve. Only hard fuckin’ work.” He flips the notebook shut and pushes it away. “I’m tired of the fuckin’ work.” His eyes burn intensely into Steve’s as his lips curl into a grin. It’s the kind of mischief Steve hasn’t seen there since they were kids. “When’s the last time I got to do something fun?”

Steve swallows his doubt.

 

*

 

Maybe it was a bad idea, Steve thinks, but Bucky’s looking at the cityscape before them like it’s a flower, a jewel. Not a target.

Bucky called it sneaking out, but it wasn’t, not really. Is it sneaking out if the guards patrolling the palace garden roll their eyes at you when they stroll past right as you’re scaling the wall? Steve’s pretty sure they could have simply walked out through the main gate, but that’s not as fun.

Steve watches Bucky watching the pedestrians, a few of whom regard the pale strangers for a moment with frank if polite curiosity.

They could go anywhere. A club. Stargazing on the cliffs above the city. A simple walk. But Bucky’s staring intently at the night market on the other side of the street, past a tangle of parked bicycles and motorbikes and handcarts.

The night is warm, glittering with city light. _Imihla, imihla_ , someone is singing in the market. _Best quality, best price, honey mango, try a slice_. A babble of voices, high and low, melodic, rough. _Marula marula! Irayisi_. There’s a sweet smell in the air, almost like baklava. Do they make baklava in Wakanda?

It’s not sneaking out, it’s not against any rules, but it stirs a frisson of something in Steve’s gut that has nothing to do with Bucky’s right hand pulling him by the elbow across the street and into the night market.

 

 _When was the last time I got to do something fun?_ That had been Bucky’s mistake, asking the question like that.

The answering look on Steve’s face had lit something inside Bucky, cascading memories of Brooklyn. Things he thought he had lost.

The time they climbed a tower of milk crates to sneak into a matinee through the theater bathroom window. The time Bucky nicked an entire angelfood cake right out of a bakery window just to watch Steve stutter with alarm before they took off running. All the times they’d pulled stupid tricks and idiot escapes in their downtime during the war.

Memorably, the time Bucky tossed a bottle of champagne to Steve in a Nazi officers’ club they were clearing after a raid. Champagne was like gold bullion, grenades shattered those cheap wartime glass bottles too easily, but he’d found one intact. Opened it and took a swig and tossed it to Steve. Just as Steve caught the bottle, the weariness and filth of his face splitting into a stunned spasm of laughter as he took a drink, there had been an outburst of German in the street and a gunshot. Their sentry was down. Bucky heard it first and panicked, pinned the entire straining bulk of Captain America against the wall in a split second, silencing Steve’s laughter under his hand. The warmth of his mouth, lips wet against Bucky’s palm, breath hot down Bucky’s wrist as the laughter died. A confusing, suspended moment, frozen between them. Waiting to be found or to be left hidden. Something in those blue goddamn _eyes_ of his.

Seconds later a hail of bullets erupted. The squad’s cover blown, the moment forgotten.

Almost. Until now.

So many little things like that keep returning to Bucky. The therapist calls it normal. Shuri says to expect a certain amount of _neural reinnervation_ as the cellular infusion and the other treatments take hold.

The memories unearthed remind him of a needleful of morphine. Sharp, painful, overwhelming just before the warmth spreads through him quick as ecstasy and unbearably sweet. All the shit that had been burnt out of him, viciously, repeatedly, over the lost decades. The blank years. The years when every memory had been scalded to ash and then turned into a leash to curb him, to erase him.

When he asked Steve that question, the spark of something bigger than mischief was there. It was every good part of what he remembered. That stronger pull of memory and craving brought everything bubbling to the surface.

His palm. Steve’s mouth. Pinning him against a wall. Just that.

He craved it as much as he feared it, the riptide between them. There was what he wanted, and then there was the vast ocean of what he knew stood in the way.

Everything from the red book, he knows, must be tamped down.

He can manage it, as long as he keeps Steve at a distance. He’s managing just fine.

 

*

 

Steve relaxes a little. The friendly chaos of the market, moving to its own perfect patterns but jostling the two of them indifferently as they make their way through, is about the strongest test of mental stability that Bucky has undergone, so far.

At the food stalls, Steve is handed a sample of something fresh off of a grill that looks like a piece of beetroot, or maybe yam. It isn’t. He swallows the fiery bite and spiciness floods his mouth with uncomfortable intensity.

Bucky laughs when Steve lunges for a cup of water from the pitcher at a nearby stall. He’s still laughing when Steve downs the water and comes up for air, aghast and still miserable and on fire. But it’s good to see him laugh like this.

“All right, tough guy, you try it,” Steve says, shoving the second half of the bite messily into Bucky’s open, laughing mouth.

Now they’re both miserable and on fire, tongues burning. Steve wants to laugh but he also wants to sandpaper his tongue off, somehow. This is ten times worse than anything in Shanghai Nat had dared him to try.

The woman turning the vegetables on the grill snickers at them. When she sees them gulping down more water, she shakes her head vigorously and speaks in a quick flow of Xhosa. Steve apologizes to her in English and she seems to take pity on them, replying in English. “You need sweet. _Iplamu_ will cut the spice better than water.” From the crowd nearby Steve sees at least a half-dozen people who nod approvingly at this advice.

“Sweet? What, like candy?” The cook shakes her head with a good-natured chuckle and speaks in Xhosa again.

The woman’s partner is busy counting change across the counter to the long line of customers awaiting their dinner, but raises her voice for their benefit. “It’s a fruit, Englishman. _Iplamu emnyama._ Efor tree plums.” Her chin juts over to the tables full of produce they had passed on their way in.

 

They don’t have any money, but luckily free samples are something of an art form in the night market. Every vendor with fruit piled in colorful heaps cuts slices and pieces of everything imaginable as they sing or chant or call out their prices and goods, passing them out like fragrant advertising.

Steve looks around but there is nothing resembling a plum that he can see. Would mangos work just as well? That’s the only fruit he recognizes here.

Meanwhile, Bucky attempts to mimic the Xhosa words the woman said to them, asking down the line of tables, one after another. Steve is mildly impressed, but the spice is a powerful motivator. The water had done absolutely nothing. Steve still feels sweat beading on his forehead.

“Emen--emnyama? Efor Iplamu? For spiciness. Please?” Steve tries not to contemplate the absurdity of the world’s once most dangerous assassin begging for fruit in a market. Natasha and Clint would get a kick out of this. Tony--he grits his teeth at the thought--would pay good money for a picture.

Bucky gives Steve a helpless shrug as he goes further down the fruit vendor aisle. His forehead looks as red as Steve’s feels.

“Oh my God. Finally.” Evidently, a smooth-skinned man has what they’re looking for, because he lights up at Bucky’s mangled Xhosa pronunciation and reaches for something. Steve steps closer to peer into the basket on the man’s table. The Efor tree fruit is nothing like a plum. It is small and dark as a kalamata olive, its skin dusky like it has just come off the tree.

The man cuts one and pulls out the little stone pit, then hands a half to each of them. The inside flesh is purple, fading to red near the center. Steve brings the fruit to his mouth without thinking, desperate for relief.

It’s so good the noise and bustle of the market quiets to a hum when he closes his eyes for a second. The juice on his tongue is tart and acidic. The spiciness fades.

He opens his eyes. Bucky is staring at him with a thunderstruck look. At his _mouth_. Steve licks his lips self-consciously.

“What.”

Eyes wide and unblinking, Bucky opens his mouth as if to speak. Steve can see the juice of the fruit staining his tongue.

For a moment, Steve catches the twitch of Bucky’s hand out of the corner of his eye and thinks he’s going to reach up and wipe Steve’s mouth for him. Steve wants to laugh off the whole thing but his grin comes out lopsided, fond. Full of too much ache.

Steve goes straight from sweet to normal to panicked when Bucky’s eyes turn blank, right before he turns and all but runs from the market.

But his path is obvious, so all Steve does is keep up. By the time they jog back through the gates to the palace grounds, Steve is wary. Bucky slows to a walk but won’t answer any questions.

As far as Steve can tell, this isn’t panic, but it does look awfully close to desperation. So he’s glad when Bucky pauses at the door to their quarters and leaves Steve there, saying only, “I have to go find Shuri.”

 

*

 

“Back for more Def Jams discography, Sargeant?” She doesn’t even look up from her computer terminal, something that looks like yet another neon-blue neuron overlaid with careful notations.

“Shuri.” He barely held everything in on the way here and finally, finally, she hears it in his voice and looks up in alarm.

“Oh, my God. Are you okay? Do you need me to call Steve? Or--”

“No! I just came from there. From Steve. I mean. He’s the--that’s the reason I’m here.”

Her brow creases with a dubious look. “The man who saved your life and wants to keep you alive? I thought that was a good thing.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he says with an edge of panic rising in his voice. “It’s--he’s--I’m too close, I can’t hold--it keeps coming back and he--” Shuri’s expression betrays fear for a split second before he remembers this is important, this is a clue. He sits down, tries to steady his nerves a little, breathing slowly for a few counts before trying again, working it out in his head.

It hadn’t been the night market. It had maybe been the color of the plum staining those lips. Bucky shakes his head to clear it, tries again.

“You know the neural protocol documentation I’ve been working on?”

She nods, waiting patiently. He’s still trying to regulate his breath.

“It helped me figure out why I’m going crazy here--no, wrong word, I mean--sorry. I’m...bored. Antsy.” She looks at him funny and he realizes she thinks he’s asking for more work in the lab. “What I mean is that I’m...missing...something. A part of the protocol. I figured it out reading some of the studies you published.”

“Missing a part of the protocol? That’s not possible, Bucky. I’m an open book, you know that. We have done everything. I know it’s not perfected yet, but it’s working. I swear to you, we have used every tool at our disposal, and my experiments have proved even a few new techniques--” His heart breaks a little to see the concern and worry on her face. She is so young to care so much and he needs to make her understand.

“Not the treatments, Shuri. That part is great. You’re going to win the Nobel prize. But I’m talking about...just...uh, the other stuff. Life. Outside. The reintegration stuff.”

Comprehension dawns in her eyes. He’s grateful, though he feels guilty for not telling her the whole story. This part is important too, he tells himself. It will help. “Ah, of course! You know, you are the first one to stay in this facility for so long. Usually the family quarters are just for the first few weeks...” Her eyes move back and forth as if she’s working out the ramifications of his words, and she begins jotting down notes on a tablet.

“Yeah, reintegration stuff isn’t working great at the palace with--for me,” he says with a tight grimace. He sucks his teeth a little at the near slip, tastes only the plum lingering there.

She looks up at him speculatively. There’s a short silence as she studies Bucky, and he tries his best to look as normal as all the doctors keep telling him he is.

“I have an idea, though you might not like it. It’ll give you more freedom. It’s not your life from before, we can’t get that back, but it’s life. It will be a good reintegration challenge for you. How do you feel about goat herding?”

That stops him for a moment. Surely anything is better than rattling around in that damn apartment, he thinks, with Steve’s nerves and his own control slipping and Steve’s _mouth_ and every memory that returns to burn through Bucky until he can’t breathe.

All he knows is that he has to keep certain things down for now. His therapist said, _You’ll have to ask him eventually_. He wasn’t so sure, especially after what happened in the market, but the words ring in his head. He comes to a decision. “I’ll herd rhinos if you think it would help.”

Shuri nods but stops him with a serious look. “Steve is going with you, just to be clear. I can’t send you out in the world unaccompanied just yet.”

He nods. Wonders, did she say that because she thought he was trying to get away from Steve? That is both the worst and best part of it. It almost makes him laugh with relief and terror. It has to be Steve.

She’s watching his reaction closely so he tries to hold his face still.

Except emotion doesn’t work like that anymore, doesn’t stay neatly underneath where he wants it to. A tremor of a smile comes over him and he’s caught it in like an undertow.

 

*

 

The next morning, Shuri rides with them in the Land Rover along a two-lane highway and then a dirt track through the sprawling grasslands past the hills west of the capital city. Steve is quiet, watching out the window the whole time. Bucky has not spoken more than a few words to him in the last twelve hours, and there is a kind of tension there, an anger he’s not ready to address.

“I won’t be able to stay for long,” Shuri had explained before they set out. “I sent word that you are coming, though.” Then she passed Bucky a rugged-looking tablet with a satellite link because apparently, he is not going to escape the therapist on this goat herding adventure, either.

They arrive at the village around midday. There is a collection of rondavel huts nestled between three hills, and woven corrals for the goats. Scrub trees with gnarled trunks spread their branches and under their shade, Bucky can see a few women watching them curiously. They are miles and miles from anything.

A crowd of little kids swarms out to greet them, tugging at Shuri and staring at Steve and Bucky. The children wear loosely tied red shifts, the color of river clay. When he smiles at one of them, the boy returns it hesitantly.

Shuri greets an old man who emerges just then from the shade of a hut. He laughs fondly and embraces the young woman and casts an appraising glance over at Bucky, who wishes he had prepared better for this. Feels too exposed, his missing arm like an ache.

Beside him, Steve shifts, his shoes crunching in the pebbly red dirt. He wants desperately to explain to Steve what he wants (well, part of it) because it’s still too close to the surface and he is overcome again by the panicky feeling of too much. _It won’t work._ Breathes and reminds himself this is the best option.

If Steve exists in the universe, maybe the only option.

The protocol is working just fine. But he knows now he can’t keep back everything from the red book. It’s going to come back. In the night market, that stain on Steve’s lips echoed in his mind with every bright bubble of memory and that Nazi champagne and his mouth on Bucky’s palm and then it hit him exactly the way they intended it to.

 _Zjhelaniye_.

Longing.

So there’s no way back now. Only forward. Steve is the poison but he’s also the goddamn antidote.

Shuri’s leaving already and Bucky can only stammer out his thanks, realizing he will miss her stupid music and her impenetrable jokes. “I’m sure I’ll see you soon, Sergeant,” she says fondly, a shadow of a kid inside the genius. She dumps a duffle bag of extra clothes for them in Steve’s arms and pauses next to Bucky before climbing back into the Land Rover. “The elder I spoke to...he fought at King T’Chaka’s side, long ago.” When Bucky turns to look again, he is startled to notice the man wears a prosthetic foot. He can hardly tell the difference in his gait. “He helped develop part of this protocol. He’ll help you with the next part, but I think you know what you need, Bucky.” Her smile is too wide and too knowing and he feels caught. “You’ll do fine.”

And then she’s in the Land Rover and waving goodbye.

When Steve turns to look at him, finally, Bucky manages a second’s immersion in the blue of those eyes. Shuri’s right. Bucky does know.

Now he just has to ask Steve to do it. To rewrite the red book. Every aching word of it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Xhosa:  
> Imihla = Dates  
> Marula = marula fruit  
> Irayisi = rice  
> Iplamu = they're talking about African black plum, which is not a plum, technically. It's more closely related to the chastetree berry. It's indigenous to Africa but not grown commercially as far as I can tell. I have no idea if it will help with spicy food, sorry, that's just a plot device :D
> 
> This chapter brought to you by Goyte's Heart's A Mess (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpN1j8R5lZ8) and other flavors of scream-cry in your car driving fast with the music up loud heartache <\3


	5. The Second Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It would be so easy to forget what he needs to say; if only he didn’t itch to take Steve’s hand and leap into the green pool of the creek. The water wants to pull him down, easy, but the numbness wants to swallow him whole.
> 
> Steve’s face will prove his undoing if he looks at it for one more second. Bucky swears softly to himself and forces himself bodily to walk away from the little cliff, from the hypnotic water, from Steve. He realizes this is going to prove more difficult than he imagined.

Before dawn touches the Wakanda horizon, Steve and Bucky are roused by the goat herders. Steve hadn’t known quite what to expect from this new life, but a gaggle of Border Tribe boys are in charge of the goats, and once they are satisfied that Steve and Bucky are following them, they ignore the men completely. They follow behind the herd of five or six dozen goats along the ankle-twisting paths that wind through narrow canyons and among the thorny trees of the bush.

The silent cabal of boys cast distrustful looks at them when they think the white men aren’t watching too closely. For good reason, Steve argues to himself. He’s not sure he’d know what to do with a goat on his own. Luckily, the animals seem even less interested in them than the boys are.

The boys all wear loose, knotted red robes, and Steve sees the logic of it as soon as the sun pierces the morning haze and burns down on them. The robes can be retied to fashion a sort of hood to protect against the worst of the heat and the glare. He wishes he had something to cover his head in this heat -- his t-shirt is both too much and not enough. It clings to him with grime and sweat, filthy after an hour or two of the hike.

Steve says nothing to Bucky all morning because Bucky is as silent as he has been since that frightening moment in the night market -- his eyes gone blank, then guarded. He doesn’t carry his trauma nakedly anymore, Steve sees, but what his friend does still carry is somehow heavier, more unwieldy. Something better dealt with out here in the wild than in the confines of the city and the palace laboratories, perhaps. Something he won’t say out loud.

Steve wants to ask about it and is terrified that he already knows the answer; there is something inside Bucky that even Shuri’s genius cannot fix. This thought worms through Steve like a virus and he thinks the fragile little peace they have enjoyed in Wakanda is the last they might ever have. He thinks that whenever Bucky is ready to talk about it, he will say something like _It’s over,_ or _There’s nothing more to be done,_ or something else equally awful and final. Life with the Border Tribe is, then, a kind of retirement for Bucky.

When Steve thinks about returning to his own life without Bucky, he goes a little breathless with fear, and that seems to make the goats go skittish, bleating and startling out of his path once or twice. Bucky gives him an odd look when it happens the second time, so Steve swallows the fear down.

They pause by a narrow, boulder-strewn creek and the herd knows what to do, immediately heading down to drink. Dusty goat hooves clatter against the rocks as the animals nimbly jostle for position under the shade of the scrubby trees. Bucky seems content to sit and watch them from underneath an acacia tree, silent as ever.

Bucky’s form in the shade, in repose, is familiar to him from a thousand meditation sessions in their quarters in the Golden City. Steve realizes with a start that Bucky is struggling to contain something, some thought that keeps breaking through the regular rhythms of his meditative breathing. Once, Steve would have simply reached over to place a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, a technique one of the therapists had taught them -- synchronizing breath. A way to help someone struggling to find calm. But is that his role anymore? Steve isn’t so sure.

As he watches, Bucky breaks off the attempt at meditation and turns to look at him. As if he knows what Steve sees, and wants him to know it. Steve only narrowly stops himself from flinching. He turns away. Bucky just needs his privacy, he reasons, ignoring the treacherous echoes of his own pulse knocking against his ribs for a moment. He just wants to forestall this awful conversation as long as humanly possible.

It’s going to be a fight. Steve just knows it’s going to be a fight. He’s not sure he has it in him to keep his optimism in the face of reality.

The canteen Steve grabbed that morning on the way out of the hut is now definitely empty. With dismay, he realizes the creek where the animals are drinking is too steep for him to reach, with its narrow cliff-like sides. He heads over to ask the Border Tribe boys if there’s a better place to fill it up. As he approaches the spot where he last saw them, he sees only a blur of sprinting bodies. The boys strip off their red robes in less than the half-second it takes to run forward and catapult off the edge of a boulder into a hidden, deep pool of water below.

Their abandoned, flung-away clothes arc and fall to the ground, a dazzle of color in the washed-out landscape. Huge, plunging splashes, gasps as they come up for air, and voices echo against the rocks. The universal, untranslatable sound of adolescent joy: whoops of delight in the water. It makes Steve forget everything for a moment.

He grins and calls over to Bucky. “They remind me of us, you know.” Bucky looks up in surprise. _Let it be normal_ , Steve tells himself. _Keep it light_. Maybe he can’t keep Bucky inside this idyll, can’t keep him at all. He can’t keep the bursting, bittersweet feel of it under his skin. He also can’t keep the foolish smile from his face as he watches the boys flipping in lazy somersaults under the surface. “We were like that once.”

Bucky slowly stands up under his tree and wanders over to where Steve stands gazing down at the swimmers.

“What, wet behind the ears?” Bucky says with a half-grin. Something hangs between them, unspoken. A dim refraction of sun glints, arcing up out of the cool green water.

“Maybe that, too,” Steve chuckles. “But I meant...daredevils. Invincible. Thick as thieves. Back before...you know,” Steve finishes vaguely. “Everything.”

“Before what, exactly?” A faint note of annoyance rings in Bucky’s voice, and the moment breaks. It wearies Steve more than anything else.

He can hear it in Bucky’s voice, anyway. The hint of _Before we knew it was over_. “Back when we didn’t have to keep so many secrets from each other.” Down below, the boys are splashing each other and singing some kind of chant that must be insulting, given how one boy reacts after a certain volley of words.

Bucky turns to look at him. “Steve--”

Steve sighs. “Don’t. You don’t have to tell me, Buck. I know.”

 

*

 

Bucky’s as surprised by that as he has been by anything in the past weeks and months in Wakanda. “You know? What do you know?”

Steve just looks at him wearily. His face is grimy where the dust of the trail has settled on him and Bucky has the sudden urge to shove him in the water with the others. There’s a tingle in his phantom arm like a clenched fist.

“I know you’re not telling me something,” Steve finally says.

After the night market, after the long silent drive into the hill country, after the punishing hike behind the stubborn goats and the boy-kings who herd them, Bucky wants nothing more than to let this burden drop into the red dirt at his feet. He wants to say, _I’m getting better but there’s still this trigger, and all this broken, corrupted machinery inside me waiting to wake up._ He needs to say, _The trigger is you._

He opens his mouth to speak and then numbness steals through him. A thin tendril of nausea coils inside, a ghost of his old conditioning come back to bring him to heel. It startles Bucky. So he says instead, “You’re right.”

A faint breeze swirls through the acacia trees just then. It carries with it the scent of dry dung and goat hair. The herd grazes in the patchy shade some distance away. The cool scent of the water below sways him on his feet. It would be so easy to jump in.

He says instead, “I’ll tell you some other time.”

It would be so easy to forget what he needs to say; if only he didn’t itch to take Steve’s hand and leap into the green pool of the creek. The water wants to pull him down, easy, but the numbness wants to swallow him whole.

Steve’s face will prove his undoing if he looks at it for one more second. Bucky swears softly to himself and forces himself bodily to walk away from the little cliff, from the hypnotic water, from Steve. He realizes this is going to prove more difficult than he imagined.

 

The rhythm of life with the Border Tribe becomes familiar: the boys waking them before dawn, ranging along the rocky hills behind the goats until the sun declines, and returning to the village for the evening meal. It becomes clearer to Bucky that hiking in the bush is a meditative practice as much as anything else.

In his spare time, Bucky sits with Olowu, the elder who knew King T’Chaka, who shares stories with him in halting English. Steve busies himself playing stickball with the children or imitating the complex spear dance they practice sometimes when they’re not busy giggling at him.

Bucky learns firewood, _xokubasa_ , and water, _amanzi_ , and something that he is fairly certain means ‘idiots’ (in a fond sort of way) because the boys collapse in laughter saying it when they send him and Steve after a nanny goat on the way back to the village one evening.

When the shadows grow long and blue each night, Bucky takes his dinner to the lea of the biggest rondavel hut, where he can listen while Olowu holds court. A group of older men and women tell stories and laugh with him in a wide circle, though Bucky does not understand more than a handful of words -- they prefer the Wakandan Xhosa to English. There’s a comfort in listening to its melodic sound anyway.

One evening as he watches and listens, he understands something that had been nagging him about this group. It has a dissimilarity to it, being made up of groupings and pairings that do not seem to fall along family lines like the rest of the village. For all that they dress in the same red robes, some of them are Wakandans who hail from elsewhere. They are, in some way, followers of Olowu. One or two of them, he sees, carry their own scars and long-healed injuries.

The next time Olowu shares a story with Bucky in halting English, Bucky stops him. “Are they--have all the others gone through the protocol, same as me?”

Olowu regards him for a thoughtful moment. “Why do you ask this?”

Bucky does not ask the question on the tip of his tongue, _Will reintegration really work for me,_ realizing at the last second that existential questions are useless. Instead, he offers, “Shuri said it was important for me to go back to my family, to my life from...before. But I can’t do that,” he finishes with a tense sort of grimace.

“You don’t need to do that,” Olowu replies slowly. “Better to be with those who know the past that formed you. The princess says ‘family’ to you, but this is also _basekhaya_ , your home, your...compatriots.” He swivels slowly to take in the wide sweep of the village, nodding toward the far clearing where Steve is playing stickball again with a few of the kids. “Like him. That is why the princess brought him here too. He is like you. _Zobumba_ .” Olowu reaches over to knock his wrinkled knuckles into the side of the clay pot that sits in the ashes of the fire before him, holding the dregs of the evening meal. “ _Zobumba_ ,” he repeats.

The pottery makes a hollow little ringing sound. “Empty?” Bucky guesses, at a loss.

Olowu rolls his eyes and huffs out a laugh, then calls over a woman passing by and repeats the word to her, and a longer phrase in their language. She nods and turns to Bucky. “He says _zobumba,_ the fire-hardened clay. Pottery. Because it cannot crack, no matter how hot the second fire burns.”

 

That night, Bucky stills his own breath as he waits. He knows Steve has been avoiding him. For a week, Steve has waited long into the night for Bucky to fall asleep before entering the small hut they share on the outskirts of the village. He cuts kindling, fetches water, performs any task to avoid the small quiet that blooms between the two of them in the dim moonlit hush of their shared rondavel.

When he finally enters the hut, Steve stops short in the doorway. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I know,” Bucky says. He smiles faintly. It’s almost a relief to see Steve’s nervousness. Bucky pushes down the numbness threatening to freeze him in place and reaches over to touch the screen of his tablet, waking it. “Shuri, T’Challa, he’s here.”

On the screen, the princess and her brother the king appear side by side in a video call. Steve peers at the glow of the tablet in the darkness. He crouches down and nods at both of them in greeting, confused.

“Captain Rogers, I apologize for the lateness of our call, but Sergeant Barnes has asked us to talk to you about something,” the king says, patting the cover of a battered red book.

Steve turns to ask Bucky a question, but Bucky is already on his feet. The numb feeling has grown to a dull roar in his ears. He _runs_.

It’s not panic; it’s something deeper. Shuri warned him it might be like this, the closer he got to unearthing what was left of his conditioning, but it’s still shockingly strong. The sight of the dark embossed star on the cover of the book like a warning.

Bucky’s legs are pins and needles, sandbags, deadweight beneath him by the time he collapses under a tree, well out of earshot, the nausea crippling him.

The red book. It’s like seeing his own skin flayed open to reveal his spinal cord; a paralyzing vulnerability.

The feeling spins together with something else. Is it that he has finally set in motion the thing that might free him? Or is it the same sweet ache that rose every time they lashed and burnt the words into him, turned the memories into the trigger? The sweetness before the terror.

He can’t say it to Steve’s face, so he hides like a broken coward while Shuri and King T’Challa explain it on the video call. What Hydra did. How they did what they did. What the words are. The necessary mechanics of the Russian phrases. (Each thought of this strings through Bucky like a nerve pulled tight, each terrible filament of exposure plucked, wrong and raw.) How to undo what has been done. What Steve can do. What the words need to become.

It’s terrible, waiting; caged by the memory of his conditioning and the knowledge of what it does, still, despite Shuri’s protocol and all the progress he’s made.

From where he waits, Bucky can see the glow of the tablet as it goes on for hours. Then the glow dims, the video call ended. A shuddering breath goes through him.

When he steps back into the hut, Bucky sees Steve looking through a list of words in Cyrillic, with pronunciations written out next to them on the tablet screen. His lips move carefully in the near-darkness.

Bucky feels himself on the knife edge of something. Returning or fleeing. Steve will refuse to do it. He will insist there is another way. Bucky feels it in his gut like the nausea is back.

Steve looks up finally, still clutching the tablet, and his eyes are wide and dark and terrible and wet.

“Bucky, how did they pick these words?”

“Didn’t Shuri explain that part?”

“Yes--no. Only in a general way, that they were linked to memories. But why these words?” He glances back down at the list, his eyes darting back and forth as he reads. “Some of them…” Steve stops, frowns.

Bucky steps close enough to the pallet bed to close his hand over Steve’s wrist, pushing the tablet away. Sits down next to him on the thin, worn woven blanket. They are so close that Bucky can see the narrow ring of Steve’s irises disappearing in the darkness around them.

 _No matter how hot the second fire burns._ Bucky can barely breathe.

“Say the first one.”

“What? No--we should--”

“Say it, Steve.” Their words barely above a whisper. If Steve is tensing for a fight, Bucky cannot see it.

Steve opens his mouth to speak, pauses. “Longing,” he says finally. His eyes close in pain as the syllables pass his lips.

There is a silence. Hollow, suspended. Inside of it, Bucky feels the ghost of something twist and coil and attempt to strike. Steve opens his eyes again and they are caught there, waiting, breath held. Nothing happens.

“What does that word mean to you?” Steve finally asks, hesitant. His eyes say more.

Bucky can feel every link in his being unchain in that moment. “I think you know.”

It is the earliest part of him, of Steve, of them together. Wanting. The simplest trigger, perfect and broad and crude. _Zjhelaniye._

He leans forward in the space of a breath. Pictures pressing a kiss to Steve’s mouth. Pictures exactly what he wants: the dizzying pull of Steve’s hands on his skin, drawing him into his lap.

 _Longing_. The easiest leash to fashion.

The only thing that stops him is the muffled drumbeat of goat hooves and the sleepy voices of the herders approaching their hut. Somehow dawn has come to spite him.

Later, on the trail, Steve looks dazed. Bucky feels a kind of mania grip him every time their eyes meet, but he cannot string together words. So he strips and dives headfirst into the deep pool of the green river, something bursting inside him at the flush rising on Steve’s face that has nothing to do with the heat. Nothing at all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took me a while to write, sorry! My outline is...less than helpful. I think this is going to be a little longer than I planned. Also, anyone else have that thing where you're struggling with multiple versions of the same character and their voice in your head? Yeah, that. Some days I'm able to channel this version of Steve and Bucky, some days I'm in a whole other timeline and can't make it happen.
> 
> Say hi in the comments! :D


	6. Two Red Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Tell me a story about rust,” Steve says. Bucky goes completely still.
> 
> Steve hesitates. Perhaps some things should not be forced into the light. “You don’t have to tell me.”
> 
> Then Bucky says, “I know. But I want to. I need to.”

The words burn in Steve like a fire.

The way Bucky looks at him all that next day, Steve is confused enough that he simply remains silent. Still, it feels like holding a live grenade.

The space between them in the dark of the hut had felt like that, too. Electric and dangerous.

He has to turn away when Bucky plunges into the water at midday, the delirium of what he wants colliding with the uncertainty buzzing through his nerves. It makes him dizzy to think of how much he is reading into those words, _I think you know._ It’s the sleep deprivation, he tells himself.

Bucky catches Steve watching him in the water and says nothing, merely gives him a lazy, slow look. Unreadable.

By sunset, Steve is a wreck.

“What if it doesn’t work?” he finally blurts out when they return within sight of the village. A few goats startle at his voice after the long silence of the trail. A pair of kids bleat from the grassy verge of the hill behind them. Bucky looks at him in surprise.

“You said yourself, it’s a goddamn miracle,” Bucky says. He stares at Steve with a kind of brightness in his eyes, an uncomfortable echo of the night they had set out for the market. Somewhere between restless and reckless.

“Shuri said she might have to put you under again if the...if it triggers—” Steve’s voice drops to a whisper. He still isn’t certain how to handle the risk of an emergency situation, or whether to warn anyone in advance, out here in the middle of nowhere.

“It didn’t though,” Bucky interrupts, stepping closer and matching his quiet tone. “Last night. You said the first one, didn’t you? Nothing happened, right?” Blue eyes serious but casual, like he’s about to dare Steve to say it again.

Steve swallows. _Longing._ It did not wake a weapon, but it lit some kind of fuse. He moves away carefully, under the guise of guiding the stragglers back to the herd. “Sure.”

“We just have to keep going,” Bucky says, as if it’s that simple. Well, perhaps it is, or should be. The ease in Bucky’s voice makes Steve want to pretend, too.

 

Steve wakes in the darkness. By the lack of birdsong outside the hut, it will be a while before the herders arrive to wake them. Having lost the previous night’s sleep, he had gone to bed early and is now fully awake.

Bucky is awake, too, judging from the shallow, even breathing only an arm’s length away on the pallet opposite him. For a while, they lie awake, each aware of each other.

“Tell me a story about rust,” Steve says. Bucky goes completely still, his breathing silenced.

This second word is different in Steve’s mind. _Rzhjavyye._ Rusted. He has tested out the feel of its silent syllables in his mouth. Unlike some of the others that suggest meanings, this word is more obscure. At Bucky’s silence, he begins to regret asking.

“That one is complicated,” Bucky finally answers, his voice rough with sleep. He turns his head toward Steve, though in the darkness all Steve sees is the outline of a profile, the scruff on the curve of his jaw. “There’s actually two memories in that one. The memory I gave them, and the one I tried to hide.” His rueful smile is no more than a shift of shadow against more shadows.

Steve considers this. He knows a little of the torture, a very small fraction. He tries to picture the magnitude of what Bucky had to endure. Shuri’s explanation had been minimal, gleaned from classified files. _Crude pavlovian conditioning using hallucinogen-refined memory extraction and non-anesthetized shock treatments._ Turning a memory into a code into a neural scar. When one was not strong enough, they added a second to strengthen the effect. Then a third, a fourth; more. The magnitude of damage inflicted over the decades of burn, shock, wipe, freeze, wake: in the end, ten code sequences were required to restrain the power of the weapon they primed within Bucky.

And yet in the maelstrom of that process, Bucky had tried to shelter something of his own.

Steve hesitates. Perhaps some things should not be forced into the light.

The quiet lies thickly over them. Steve clears his throat. “You don’t have to tell me.”

Then Bucky says, “I know. But I want to. I need to.”

 

*

 

“It started with a joke. In the early years, they hadn’t perfected things yet. My arm, I mean. This would have been...the nineteen-fifties. You remember what technology was like back during the war—all bolts and rivets—well, it wasn’t much better than that when they built me an arm. They called me the robot. The drugs weren’t as good at first, either. Sometimes they would forget to dose me and I would half-remember my name by the morning…” He pauses. Memories shift, unstable the more he tries to grasp for them. _Something red and dry on his hand, something red and wet on Steve’s face_. Bucky shakes his head to clear it and tries again.

“That was before they understood how—how versatile a weapon a Winter Soldier could be, if they pushed a little harder. Later it was...more controlled. On one of my first missions, they gave me a new prototype arm. It was one big gun,” he laughs mirthlessly. This part, at least, is clear. “That thing was solid as a German tank, but it wasn’t designed for Soviet winters. Damn thing froze up in Seversk. Wouldn’t bend, wouldn’t fire. It was corroded...rusted.”

The memory is little better than a nightmare. Huddling in position, an operative hissing desperately at him over the radio, идти, идти, _Go, go_ , while Bucky wrestles open the broken, irreparable mechanism; the corrosion crumbling away in a rust-red powder in his hand and the redness of it against his skin shocking memory back into place; frozen, unable to shoot, trying to remember.

With Steve across from him in the dark, a steadying presence, it’s easier to see both parts of it at once: both the nightmare of the rusted gun arm and what it sparked in him, that scrap of a dreamlike memory from the war—Steve turning to him at the riverbank—

Bucky tries to shape words around it.

The coil of nausea tightens. The remains of his conditioning still threaten to take over, sending a wave of numbness over him. It’s as if Steve senses this, because he reaches his hand over to Bucky’s shoulder, settling it there against his skin, warm and solid and comforting.

Palm to shoulder, they lie still, breathing. It’s something Steve had often done during their meditation sessions, but after the strained silence of the last couple weeks with the Border Tribe, it feels like a revelation. The stillness warms inside him, stretches into something closer to calm. Bucky dares to reach his own hand up, trapping Steve’s hand there against himself. An anchor. Fights the urge to lean his cheek down on Steve’s fingers.

He tries to salvage the thread of his story.

“They had to extract me, scrap the mission. They almost scrapped me. I only heard about this later, from another Winter Soldier...that was the first time a soldier’s code failed to work. I was in a bad state when they got me back to base. I was screaming, the other soldier told me. Screaming something over and over again.” Maybe a word. Maybe a name.

“Zola said, no use for a robot полный ржавчины, full of rust. When the trigger word didn’t work, he ripped out the arm and pumped me full of the drug they used for our conditioning. But it was—more. Worse. Than the first time. As an experiment. Why go easy if he was just going to scrap me, later.”

A thoughtful, pained silence.

Steve lets out a breath. “So they turned that into the trigger,” Steve says.

(Dry red rust in his hand, the rust of his own body; or darker red, wet and smeared against skin. What did it matter to them? It mattered.)

“That’s what I told them. There was another thing, though, like I said. Hidden. In Russian, that word—it’s...it’s two things, right? What happens to metal, but also the color. That dark red color. I think that’s what—it was a memory they hadn’t wiped. It was something from the war, from when we—do you remember the Maas?”

Steve startles a little, Bucky can feel it in the palm still pressed to the skin of his shoulder, but he won’t let go, won’t let Steve pull back. Let Steve think just for a moment it’s unconscious, Bucky thinks. Just for a moment.

“The Maas River. The one we had to cross to link up with Morita’s detachment after their scouting mission? What about it?”

Bucky can hear the hesitation in Steve’s question. Wonders if Steve remembers this part at all. If the failed Winter Soldier mission is smoke, nightmare, shifting when he tries to pin it down, that moment on the Maas is fire. Real and dangerous, a heat that still burns.

He grips Steve’s hand in his. “You remember how clear it was that night—moon like a spotlight? We waded across to the opposite bank with water up to our noses. I piled all my gear on top of my helmet.” Steve nods, remembering.

The light outside is growing to a dull blue already; the goats and the wise-eyed boys will arrive soon. He’s running out of time.

“With the moon like that, we were going to get picked off by snipers from that occupied village we had to pass. So you had the bright idea to get filthy again...right after we’d just gotten clean in the river, for the first time in weeks. Paint ourselves up with mud from the river. Remember?”

It comes clearer now. When his gun arm froze in Seversk and his memory glitched at the sight of the rust, this was the other memory: Steve turning to him, eyes alight with mischief, face daubed with slashes of clay; scooping up a palmful of rust-red clay from the riverbank and painting it onto Bucky’s face slow and careful, each pass of his long fingers like torture. Bucky holding utterly still. Steve painting as if he was a canvas. Reverent and attentive, like he already knew each curve and hollow of the face before him. Like he was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Bucky swallows against the lump suddenly in his throat, unable to describe this part, terrified that Steve does not remember it the same way. It was only ever something Bucky was permitted to glimpse in those terrifying seconds of activation and wiping, over the decades. Maybe it never happened the way he remembered. Zola had his ways of twisting things, especially after so long, the trigger sequence growing each time. Alone and terrified on the Seversk mission, waking from his conditioning at the worst moment, it had been the thing he reached for; maybe he had reached for something that never happened at all.

Except Steve slips his hand out of their grasp and the soft pad of one finger traces Bucky’s cheekbone, his temple, here and now in the quiet of the hut. “Oh, I remember,” Steve breathes. Runs delicate traceries as if painting smooth, wet clay again on his skin. “I remember this.”

Each touch sparks electric against Bucky’s skin. Steve traces along the bone of his brow and down. Bucky holds still now like he had then. His breath shallow. His mind gone blank, fled.

He has run out of words. Only fire and pulse left, and this bliss. There is a pull between them that Bucky can feel in every cell of himself, singing, needing. 

Steve cups his face in one hand, runs the pad of his thumb across his lips so soft and slow it breaks a strangled sound like a moan from within Bucky.

Steve pulls his hand away as if scalded. “They took so much from you,” he says, his voice roughened. Eyes wide and dark, staring up at the thatching, pain writ plainly on his face. When Steve curls into himself, it looks like nausea.

Fire fades slowly on Bucky’s skin everywhere he was touched, his blood slowing. How did that magnetic pull between them disappear so fast?

“Some things were worth the risk. Rust was one of them,” Bucky says after a long silence. He aches.

No reply comes.

Bucky wants to pull that hand back to him. But not at the cost of Steve’s pain.

He just wants what he is allowed.

Bucky touches his own cheek and the ghost of warmth lingering there.

A hard rain begins to fall outside, which explains why the goat herders never arrive, why the dawn never quite dispels the dimness of the light, why the chill will not leave his bones. Why the two of them lie there, each thinking and saying nothing, undisturbed, for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this allowed dot vine hashtag get it together, Steve
> 
> Oho! Who needs cock-blocking goats when you're emotionally constipated?? So much headcanon I’m trying to cram in here...spoiler alert (not a spoiler) Steve’s nausea has nothing to do with that moan (does it ever?) and everything to do with Extreme Empathy Slash Trying To Be Good, Damnit (as ever). 
> 
> Apologies (as usual) for any language usage issues with the Russian. I know ржавчины is a little different from the actual trigger word, I needed them to get close to the word without actually saying it. Actually saying the words properly (in order and with real meanings restored) is coming in a later chapter and I want to save it for effect ;)


	7. Firsts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Say what you were going to say, Steve. Say. It.”
> 
> “Does it—Bucky. The dawn. Does it mean what I think it means?”
> 
> *
> 
> Angsting up a storm at the spear dance, and some flashbacks (and missing scenes) circa CA:TFA.

In the dark of each morning, Steve wakes and thinks of the triggers Bucky has given him so far. So much weight packed into two small words.  желание.  Longing.  _ You know what it means _ .  ржaвый.  Rusted. The smooth planes of Bucky’s face under his fingers in the darkness, echoing that moment at the River Maas that he thought was lost to memory.

He practices the sounds of the Russian whenever he gets a moment alone, which does not seem to be often. He knows Bucky needs him to help rewrite these terrible words, but Steve feels a sort of rewriting happening inside his own skin, too. Memory, he discovers, becomes infinitely stronger when shared like this. His thumb tracing Bucky’s lips, the heat of breath there, and knowing Bucky remembered it too, had sent a shock of lust through him, fearsomely strong. But Bucky had held back, so Steve follows suit.

In the dark of each morning, however, there is a closeness he will allow himself to take, to need, before the day truly begins. He will sit up quietly on the narrow pallet bed, the woven blanket tangled under him. He will let himself pretend Bucky does not lie there, stilled, perhaps even awake beneath closed eyelids, waiting for this. Perhaps it is something he merely tolerates for Steve’s sake, like a creature only half-tamed might permit a caress.

Like this, each morning, he will place his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. The muscle and bone there pliant, at rest. A warmth pulses between them. Controlling the slight tremble that threatens to reveal too much, Steve brushes down the bare skin of Bucky’s arm. Slowly, all the way down, shoulder down to elbow, forearm to wrist. Holding his breath. Fingertips light, like sketching in a highlight of gleaming skin along a chalk drawing.

In the dark of each morning, every time, he ends with his fingers in Bucky’s open palm. A ragged exhale trailing from Bucky’s lips in the second before his hand twitches and grasps at Steve’s, clasping their fingers together. Clutching in pain, or something like it. 

That’s when the moment breaks and Steve can no longer pretend this is something he can have without wanting more.

“They’ll be here soon,” he says then to Bucky, rising and pulling their hands apart in one smooth motion. Every time. Going to stand in the doorway, stretching and sighting the soft shapes of the goats in the distance. Swallowing any other words he wants to say.

 

He’s not surprised to find Bucky shadowing him one evening when he heads to the clearing where the children practice the spear dance. Bucky used to prefer listening to Okomi in the evenings, but for the last week, Bucky has increasingly followed Steve on his rounds of chores. The women had chased Steve away the evening before, saying they had more than enough firewood for the week, and he had filled the water barrels for the village gardens before the evening meal with Bucky’s help. Now there’s nothing to do but tag along with the children and try to ignore Bucky’s gaze on him that says too much and too little, somehow.

With sticks and hollow canes in hand, the children prepare to practice the spear dance that night under the watchful eye of Nobomi, an older girl with serious eyes.

She gives Steve a warning look when they appear at the edge of the clearing, and calls over to them. “Not you, tonight.”

“No?” He’s disappointed but tries not to let it show. On his previous visits, he had enjoyed attempting to follow the spear dance movements in his own halting way, even if his efforts occasioned laughter from the children and lots of eye-rolling from the teenagers. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the challenge and had hoped to learn more, tonight.

“This moon—” she gestures over her shoulder toward the full moon, a yellow doubloon against the ocean of early twilight behind the trees, “—we have a special practice. Like a test.”

“Oh. Well, can we stay to watch?”

She nods, then jerks her head to indicate they should stay out of the way. She favors him and Bucky with a brief, shy smile before turning back to martial the crowd of youngsters to attention. Steve and Bucky find a good spot to watch from under the trees at the edge of the clearing as the children begin to dance together. Nobomi beats two sticks together, a steady rhythm.

The spear dance is a Border Tribe specialty, a twisting, jumping, intricate performance with artful defensive and offensive moves in turns. Spear in hand, performed with fierce strength and speed, it is a warrior’s display; at a slower pace and with empty hands, it is a meditative art of endurance and grace. A couple performed the partner version one night around the evening fire, after much cajoling from their friends, and their version was limber and subtle as a tango, a seduction. 

For the children, it is a challenge of technique and daring, as much a duel as a dance. The practice spears arc and swoop low together. There is a concentrated grunt of breath as the group executes a particularly daring jump with a mid-air spin; at least two children land on their behinds and then scramble back into position. It’s dazzling to watch the mix of athletic poise and determination and sheer mule-headed competitiveness among them, as visible as the breezes stirring above their heads. Shouts ring out to emphasize certain movements, sudden bursts of emotion that raise goosebumps along Steve’s arms despite the cool of the evening. 

In English, they will refer to it as the spear dance, though the kids call it  _ ingoma  _ as often as not, a word which simply means a song or a chant. When they count as a group to Nobomi’s rhythm like this, numbering the forms of the dance as they go, it sounds more like a flow of music. “Zintlanu. Zintandathu.” He realizes there is a subtle melody behind the number chant, and feels stupid for not hearing it before. Beside him, Bucky is silent, watching.

Everything speeds up toward the end with a series of moves that only some of the older children have mastered. Steve has only seen them get this far in practice once or twice. Nobomi is less forgiving than some of the other leaders; she refuses to stop, beating out a rhythm on her sticks with determination, and they push through the usual faltering spots to enter a difficult sequence. One by one, the younger and less experienced stop, breath heaving, and step aside. A wide space forms to give the remaining dancers adequate room. “Lishumi. Lishumi-elinanye. Lishumi-elinesbini,” the chant continues, voices ringing. 

Only three pairs remain, straining for precision and speed in the low light of the moon, which has not finished rising and is still stuck in the branches of the trees. They duck and leap in synch, toeing the line between cadence and abandon. One pair smacks together in a howl of pain and hastily stumbles to the side to disentangle and avoid being hit by the others.

Nobomi grins fiercely at the remaining dancers as they enter the final movements. Steve admires the girl’s quiet but firm leadership. Having watched so many evenings of this, he knows that most of the teenagers are content to let the younger children practice only the simpler movements at the beginning before stopping for endless bouts of showing off and occasional sparring. Nobomi’s concentration focuses the attention tighter into the center of the circle.

Steve turns to gauge Bucky’s reaction to the sight of this, wondering if he misses sparring practice as much as Steve does. It was something he and Nat had found time for on most of their long-term missions together, just to keep in fighting form. Bucky’s eyes flicker with interest even as he stops to tease one of the smaller boys who wanders over. The boy, Uuka, has taken a special liking to Bucky, and feints toward him with his practice cane a few times before he scatters back towards his fellow dancers, attracted by the spectacle.

Even Nobomi is chanting now — “Anesine! Anesihlanu!” — and the rising noise draws even Bucky’s gaze from the periphery of the clearing. Only a girl and boy pair remain in the dance, their faces sweaty, spears flashing in the darkness. Spinning, a final whirl of motion, closer and closer. Precise, trusting, deadly.

They finish, triumphant, each shouting to emphasize the final pose: faces upturned and arms raised high, each spear hovering no more than a hand’s breadth before their opponent’s exposed neck. With the sheer momentum of the dance, it would only take a small slippage to crack into a windpipe, or worse. 

Nobomi rushes forward to snatch the sparring spears out of their shaking hands, grinning proudly. There is a riot of noise and excitement at their triumph. Steve only catches a glimpse before the whole gleeful tumult stampedes toward the main village, celebrating. The clearing empties in seconds, only footprints remaining in the dirt to show where the dance ended moments before.

He almost misses the sturdy length of hollow cane that Bucky suddenly tosses toward him. Steve turns and catches it on instinct.

Bucky steps into the clearing. The moon has risen above the trees now and pours down silver and blue across Bucky’s features. The canes are really more sword-length for an adult, perhaps three feet long. Steve has only ever practiced empty-handed before, and he worries suddenly that Bucky was watching the spear dance more closely than he assumed. He steps closer to Steve with his own cane readied, face shadowed and unreadable. Are they doing this now? Steve isn’t ready to defend himself with a stick and finds himself reaching futilely for his shield, not for the first time.

At the last second, Steve raises his flimsy cane to block the blow, knocking against Bucky’s stick with a hollow sound. Bucky presses forward into their crossed weapons and suddenly his face is unnervingly close and full of a kind of wounded, confused questioning. Steve feels sick. He wants to apologize for trying to take something he hasn’t been offered, all these mornings. He wants to get back to what they are supposed to be doing here. He thinks, suddenly, that sparring with Bucky right now is a terrible idea. There are so many echoes of so many fights between them, clamoring for space in Steve’s brain. His apologies hover, but his nerves win out and he reaches for a joke. “I’m so out of practice. I think it would probably take only one or two of those kids to whip the pants off me,” Steve is dying to break the tension. 

Bucky’s mocking eyes drag downward, lingering on Steve’s pants for a half-second before coming to rest on his face again. Before Steve can curse his own stupid mouth, Bucky says, “I bet I could whip the pants off you, too.” He licks his lips when he says this and Steve really does curse himself for a fool. Bucky is spoiling for a fight.

So be it. Steve’s going to need the sparring to be very, very intense to shut his brain up. He can’t keep thinking like this, not when each morning he touches Bucky like that and keeps pretending he wants nothing more. So he shoves forward against Bucky with a mighty effort to throw him off and then in a flurry of motion they are fighting in earnest.

They spar in near silence, weapons making a hollow whirring sound as they fight for position, parrying blows and the canes clacking every time they meet. Their weapons knock together with enough force to shatter and splinters shower into the dirt. Neither of them misses a beat, each merely grabbing another cane from the discards scattered around the clearing.

Even with only one arm, Bucky spars confidently, balanced and quick; but he has an advantage, too. The sparring is intense in a way Steve did not expect. Does Bucky grin like that on purpose, shading from feral to something much dirtier, to make him lose focus? 

Steve’s control slips and Bucky breaks through his defense easily. Landing on one knee, holding up the cane between both hands to block the oncoming blow, Steve blurts out, “ Семнадцать.”  _ Seventeen.  _ The third trigger word.

Bucky freezes. Steve fears for a moment he’s ventured a step too far, but Bucky’s grin doesn’t falter. A look of relief crosses his face as if the need to fight has drained out of him. After a second, he drops his cane to offer Steve a hand up. 

“Семнадцать. Seventeen years old.” He pauses while Steve gets to his feet, catching his breath. “My first kiss.” 

“Wait… Didn’t you kiss Mary Elizabeth on your  _ thirteenth  _ birthday?”

“Not my first kiss with a girl,” Bucky clarifies. 

Steve can feel his cheeks flush red. He stumbles. He had always wondered. To make it worse, Bucky turns just then, watching him closely when he says it, too. “A kid named Patrick from Hell’s Kitchen. Top of the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island.” Voice gone soft as he remembers it, head tipped back and lips parted just so.

Steve wants to rest his thumb on that plush lower lip again and feel the breath coming from Bucky’s mouth. Wants to erase Patrick’s kiss with his own. It burns, just a little, and he realizes then that it’s a dangerous feeling; there will surely be more things like this hiding in the memories Bucky unearths. Things that Steve won’t like hearing and that will remind him of all the lost time between them. Not sweet, stolen moments on the River Maas: missed chances on the Wonder Wheel. He needs to steel himself. 

“Why didn’t they just use the word  _ kiss _ , then,” he says, aiming for a joking tone and failing. “Seems a little poetic for Hydra.” He can’t choke back the feeling of wishing it was his, that first kiss. 

Bucky’s staring hard at him, as if challenging the bitterness laid bare in his voice. Steve can’t meet his eyes. Not for a million bucks.

“It wasn’t about the kiss,” Bucky finally says. There is a quiet shock in his voice. “It was because I couldn’t stop thinking of someone else the whole time. Patrick was...skinny. All elbows and knees. Blond hair. Eyes as blue as...” 

A warmth blooms in Steve’s chest, a feeling like dying, like possession.  _ As mine _ . He sees nothing but wide, dark pupil in the blue of Bucky’s eyes when he finally looks up. 

“Семнадцать,” Steve repeats in a whisper, a glimmer of understanding daring to flare to life inside him at this admission.

“Yes.”

“And the next one—?”

Bucky nods. “Say it.”

Something twists in his gut to hear that rough whisper spilling from Bucky’s mouth. An echo. “ Рассвет,” speaks finally.  _ Dawn  _ or  _ daybreak _ . His need to know is painful. Let it be the one he wants. Steve knows which one he would have picked for himself. There have been thousands of dawns and Bucky could have picked any one of them.

“Does it...Bucky, I don’t want to —” He hesitates but Bucky only presses closer.

“No. Say what you were going to say. What were you going to say?”

 

On November 4, 1943, the captured men of the 107th who barely escaped Hydra’s base in Austria with Steve had marched almost the entire night to reach safety behind Allied lines. Wired but wrecked with fatigue, they had stopped only briefly, right before the final push to base camp. Safe but not home.

When day arrived, Steve knew he would have to face Colonel Phillips’ wrath and scorn, and possibly Peggy’s anger, too, since he never did get a chance to call for that safe extraction she promised. 

A low pall of clouds had robbed the approaching dawn of any radiance. Day and all its consequences could wait. Steve huddled against the wall of a ruined shed and could hardly stop looking at Bucky, this man he had rescued against all odds, conjured to his side like a magic trick. 

 

“Say what you were going to say, Steve. Say. It.”

“Does it —Bucky. The dawn. Does it mean what I think it means?”

 

While the others huddled in the shell of the shed for warmth, Bucky stayed next to him, their guns trained on the path in case of an attack.

Minutes ticking by in silence. He rescued them from the mouth of hell — what happened to Bucky in that laboratory? Steve has the weight of a hundred questions on his tongue but he needs to let him rest for this stolen hour.

But he breaks, God help him, Steve breaks, when Bucky begins to laugh. Quietly at first, helpless little puffs of air, and then a hysterical giggle that he has to stifle. It robs Bucky of breath until he folds over in a heap, quaking with silent laughter. Bucky finally settles down, his finger back on the trigger, trained on the rearguard path. A grin plastered across his beautiful face.

“Captain  _ fucking _ America.” 

“Damnit, I thought you were a goner.”

“Can’t keep a good man down, Cap.” 

He colors at the silly title, but the reality of it is inescapable. This is more than propaganda reels and USO shows, now. And then there is a risk to the strength he’s been gifted, and he’s found it sitting next to him with a case of the giggles. “Shut up, you idiot.” Fondly. Too fond. He sobers. “Buck, I—” The very thought of losing him is paralyzing, like something necessary ripping loose inside, gone nerveless. The realization of that narrowly avoided fate, after the terrors of the night, unmoors him. 

“You what? Go on. Say it.” That mocking tone in Bucky’s voice gone quiet, rough with something unsaid. Those blue eyes bloodshot and bright. Daring.

Steve can only lean down to capture Bucky’s mouth in a bruising kiss, trying to let it speak every word he cannot. He only has this kiss, this last moment before they return to base and the war comes crashing back down around them. Bucky doesn’t even have time to kiss him back, and Steve doesn’t have time to explain. Dawn is breaking. They break apart because footsteps approach: the hour is up. His heart cracks a little. Bucky’s eyes are depthless, soft, watching him. They have to move on. 

 

“...What you  _ think  _ it means?” Bucky echoes him faintly. 

Leaning forward, exactly as wordless and helpless in the face of what he wants now as he had been then, Steve kisses him in the silent clearing. The moon is high and bright above them, suspended; feeling like he is being dangled over an abyss of time, Steve trembles against those lips. Wanting more. A live current runs in his veins seeking an outlet.

When Bucky finally, finally kisses him back, it is grounding and shocking all at once, an electric plunge. Steve reaches up to pull him closer, hands tightening in his hair and in the cloth of his shirt, startling a groan low within them both as the kiss deepens. It starts simple and grows maddeningly filthy, the slide of Bucky’s lips and tongue under his sending sparks through him at a frantic, mounting pace. 

It is perfect. It is dizzying. Steve stops to breathe and he is nearly overcome by the sensation of Bucky’s mouth at his ear, breath urgent and wet, demanding. “Are you going to ask me any more stupid questions tonight?”

Steve only kisses him again, erases everything that came before, too fond and possessive by half. The night sky wheels overhead, dizzying him with stars when he looks up. He is dazzled by what he wants, and how much, even though for once it is right here, Bucky is right here, in his arms, and still kissing him back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay kissing! Yay rating going up in future chapters, you’ve been warned! Not all of the trigger words are going to be quite so sweet and sappy, don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll find a way to fuck the romance up a little. I hope someone remembered to pack the lube. Anyway, soon we’ll get back to your regularly scheduled angst and trauma recovery with heavy pining.  
> A note on spear dances: they exist in isiXhosa-speaking cultures and all over Africa (and elsewhere, of course), including the cultures that Wakanda (loosely) draws from, as I understand it. But there’s nothing in the Marvelverse about this that I could find (please tell me if you know of something!), so I created one. It makes sense to me that Wakandan tribes would have dances that serve many goals: it can be for competition or meditation (a solo, partnered, or group dance) as well as martial training (much like tai chi can be performed fast or slow, and capoeira can be performed solo or partnered), and it’s also a great form of entertainment for Border Tribe kids. However, I am not a dance ethnologist/anthropologist, lol, just a really curious Googler who is deeply invested in good old-fashioned world-building with a touch of decolonization! (Also, words not translated in the spear dance section are numbers or parts of numbers.)


	8. Drinking Poison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If torture and brainwashing can said to be simple, it was just that, in the early days: simple. 
> 
> It was not simple, later.
> 
> What was it his therapist said? If resentment is the poison you take hoping the other person will die, survivor’s guilt is the poison you take hoping to keep your abuser alive. You’re not the one at fault here. They are. You don’t have to drink the poison.
> 
> No, but he can’t rest in this quiet lull forever.
> 
> (Two more words, Furnace and Nine, and their stories.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to the amazing [politik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/politik/pseuds/politik) for being my beta reader and validating my angst! You rock.
> 
> And thank you to everyone who left wonderful encouraging comments over the past couple weeks, they really kept me going :D

* * *

 

The heat of the afternoon blankets the veldt below and the hills above with suffocating stillness. If his hair didn’t still curl damp and cool behind his ears, Bucky would swear he had never even gone swimming a short time ago. The water evaporates off his skin right into thin air in this heat.

Not a breeze stirs, and no one bothers to move. The boy herders lounge and pick at manketti nuts under their preferred thorn tree grove in the near distance, beyond the sun-dazed goats. It will be hours before it’s cool enough to bother moving the herd.

Bucky and Steve’s spot is under an acacia on the sloping, rocky cliffside alongside the swimming hole. Steve says it has the best view, but it isn’t so majestic at the moment. The midday haze steals the color from everything. The distant hills are barely visible, bleached into dry yellow waves tumbling to the vast stretch of grassland below.

Bucky is glad that Steve is asleep for the moment, or pretending to be, his head pillowed on one arm. Without those blue eyes looking at him, he has a moment’s peace in which to pretend it will stay this peaceful, no questions to be asked or answered by the outside world. Their kiss had turned into more kisses (and more, and more than kisses) last night, but in the light of day Steve had been shy, not standoffish or awkward, but also not making a move once they were in sight of the others, even though Bucky made it clear he would not have minded—nor would the Border Tribe, he suspects. Steve Rogers, ever the gentleman.

It drove Bucky crazy.

He spent most of the morning trying to get that perfect Captain America facade to break, to crack even one fraction of an inch and admit what he wanted, what was going on beneath the surface, between them, and what he could have, right now, if only Steve said the word. On the trail, he invaded Steve’s space under the pretense of assisting with the retrieval of a stray pair of goat kids, daring him to say something. He waited until the boy herders led the herd around a bend in the trail and then blocked Steve’s way forward so he stumbled up against Bucky for a moment—the whole burning warm press of his body, almost enough, almost what he wanted—before Bucky took pity on the wild look in Steve’s eyes and moved aside. He dared Steve over and over, and yet nothing.

When they reached the crevasse where the creek meandered and formed a swimming hole, he told Steve he was going swimming, and then proceeded to stand just one or two steps too close to him while he stripped off his clothing, peeling off his sweat-soaked shirt the slowest, so it clung to the muscular planes of his torso. Looking Steve in the eyes the whole time.

And damn him, the man kept his cool. Though by the time Bucky was fully naked, Steve’s eyes were wide with things unsaid. Then he mumbled a vague excuse and went to lie down in the shade.

Despite the frustration, a part of Bucky enjoys the way Steve holds back, or wants to keep things private, or both. It means anything Bucky can get during the day is stolen and secret, his heart racing a little. It’s sweeter that way. It makes Bucky greedy for what he knows he can do to him in the dark, later, when they are alone.

He knows these moments are something he has to steal, to savor, before Steve realizes. Before he hears everything that comes next. Everything Bucky has revealed of the code memories so far has been shared, like being seventeen years old, like moments stolen at the River Maas or right before sunrise. All the codes from the early years seem laughably _nice_ , Bucky muses under the droning heat of the midday sun.

If torture and brainwashing can said to be simple, it was just that, in the early days: simple.

It was not simple, later.

What was it his therapist said? _If resentment is the poison you take hoping the other person will die, survivor’s guilt is the poison you take hoping to keep your abuser alive. You’re not the one at fault here. They are. You don’t have to drink the poison._

No, but he can’t rest in this quiet lull forever. He needs all the words to be spoken. He needs to prove to himself that the Winter Soldier conditioning is well and truly gone. He needs to prove it to Steve, too. Whenever he remembers this, it makes every fond, aching thought of kisses and hands sliding up under his shirt in the darkness disappear like a daydream.

The heat lazes, time stretches empty and silent beneath the pale, burning sky. Steve’s soft breath, even and light, is audible against the murmuring insects in the trees when he listens just right. That layer of _Steve_ underneath the sound of the world feels like safety. Even if he isn’t sure whether to trust it will catch him when he falls.

 

*

 

By the evening, Bucky is tired and footsore and he has an ache in the muscles above his amputation scar. After practically begging for attention all day and getting nothing more than heated looks, he wants to ask Steve to massage out the knot and then make him work for anything more. How much longer can that gentlemanly act of his hold out?

When he ducks through the doorway of the rondavel hut, however, these thoughts are gone in an instant. Steve is seated with the tablet before him. Bucky recognizes the face on the screen before he registers the voice crackling over the audio. Feeling a little faint, and not with desire this time, he sits down heavily next to Steve.

“—if we get that far. Ah, there he is. Good to see you, Barnes.”

Bucky nods wordlessly at Natasha, squinting a little in the glare of the screen. He feels like an intruder here but his limbs have gone clumsy, deadweight pinning him in place.

Steve hesitates a second before clearing his throat. “Okay, then. Natasha, I’ll get a message to you if...if I can’t…”

“Just do you what you need to do,” she interrupts, not unkindly, sparing Steve the awkwardness. She appears to study the image of the two of them for a long moment, quiet, her face unreadable. Then she merely nods and ends the video call.

He’s leaving. Obviously, Steve is leaving. There is no steel left in Bucky’s body, nothing but breakable bone and scar tissue; nothing that can protect against this feeling. Will it always be like this? It takes him a second before he can look at Steve. The unspoken thing between them is no longer something sweet and aching with need; it twists and rips away at something vital. He’s going and Bucky knows it and he knows Bucky knows it.

Bucky asks what feels like a silly question, but it’s the only question that matters: “When?”

Steve almost flinches. Won’t meet his eyes. “Four days from now.”

It’s more than Bucky expected. It’s not enough. Foolish, selfish, he hates the goodness in Steve for one fleeting, awful moment, because it’s that moral goddamn _light_ in him that will spur him back into action, back to whatever mission Natasha has planned, back to the life that will take him out of Wakanda for a long, long time.

“Listen, I know it’s not a lot of time. I’m sorry,” Steve says, his voice quiet. “If this wasn’t time-sensitive and if she had anyone else who could help on this particular mission, I swear, I’d tap out. I know we need to...I know you have to…” Steve trails off, pensive. “A lot can happen in four days.”

“Or nothing at all. Not enough,” Bucky replies before he can stop himself. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to ask for anymore, but it’s more than the trigger words and it’s more than what he can steal in the breathless dark hours of the night.

“Enough time to do what you asked me to do?” Steve asks quietly.

_You don’t have to drink the poison._

“Do you still want to go through the rest of the words, Buck?”

Bucky stays silent. Answers roar through him. If he holds still, just now, Steve only a hands’ breadth away from him, two possibilities seem to tremble just out of reach. Speak, or say nothing. Go on with the words, tell Steve things that might destroy what little good he still sees in Bucky, or leave the words unspoken, and have this time together. Four days, four _nights_. Four nights of kisses bruising his neck tender. Four nights dizzy and hard, grinding up into the hot press of Steve’s hand. Four nights drunk on the salt taste of his skin.

But then the broken machinery of his conditioning would linger like unexploded ordnance, ready to destroy everything at one wrong step. The conditioning still lies just under the surface, that much is clear to him; it has healed enough to let him live quietly, but not well. He would always dread the sick lash of nausea and fear pulled tight enough to snap, flaying memory wide open. He pictures how it happened in the market — one moment normal, the next needing to fight or to fuck or to die. He cannot live like that.

No. Even if it changes things, even if the way Steve looks at him will be a little less bright, he can’t stand the idea of not getting free of this leash, not when it looms so terribly, painfully close.

He reaches across the space between them to rest his hand on Steve’s chest, warm through the thin material of his t-shirt. Velvet dark around them breathes, waiting. “Yes,” Bucky says finally. “We have to—I have to keep going.”

Steve nods. His face is gentle when he looks directly at Bucky, a look that seems to belie the magnitude of everything. Can he possibly understand what he’s agreeing to? What they are giving up to get there?

Bucky swallows the strangled sob that threatens to choke him and it turns into an awkward little laugh. “It ain’t pretty, you know.”

“Really? I was expecting daisies and daffodils.” The faintly mocking smirk on Steve’s lips sends a real, honest-to-god giggle through Bucky, and the feeling of relief is almost as good as happiness. Maybe.

“Go figure, no florists on staff at Hydra. That I know of.” It’s a weak joke, but it’s all Bucky’s got. He knows he’s stalling, and so does Steve.

“Hey, whatever it is, I’m not going to judge,” Steve insists, the jest fading. “Or don’t tell me about the rest of the words, if you don’t want to. Honest.”

“No, I want to tell you. I mean, I _need_ to. But the rest of them are...not like the ones we’ve done so far.” Bucky pulls his hand away and scoots back, putting distance between them, as if it will help. “They’re not my memories from...before. They’re my memories from...during.”

“Your time as the Winter Soldier, you mean.”

“Yeah.” Bucky hears, not for the first time, how peculiar the title sounds in English. The Russian солдат, _soldat_ , rings in his memories.

“I’ve seen some of it, don’t you remember? The tape of the Starks’ assassination? Or how about when you tried to kill me? I knew you were in there somewhere, Buck, but I knew it wasn’t you doing all that. It was the Winter Soldier.”

There’s that certainty in Steve again. He carries an unshakeable brightness in him, despite everything. He won’t know anything else, unless Bucky tells him.

 

* 

 

It’s a story with too many stops and starts, and a break for a fitful, brief night of sleep in the middle. Come morning, they beg off on herding duties (earning disapproving looks from the boys) and instead take a long walk along the grassy verge of the hillside where no one will bother them.

A part of Bucky sinks like a lead weight to even put it into words, but there’s no time. No place left to hide this part of himself. The four days are running through his hands like water. He tells the story of печь, the oven, the furnace.

 

The next time Bucky broke through his conditioning, they chained him to a pipe like a rabid dog.

They left him in a room at the far end of the unused east wing in the training center. It was an old building, dating back to the Imperial era, and its grandeur had faded, the plaster ceilings crumbling in places.

There was nothing in the room but the six-inch cast iron pipe at his back and a haphazard pile of tables and chairs stacked well out of reach by the old wood-burning furnace at the far end of the room, a furnace they did not bother to light.

An unheated room in near-freezing temperatures. Not a soul to hear him.

The cold he could ignore—it was the memories that swam to the surface. Persistent, horrifying, clear as day. He lay there with every memory alive and agonizing, his metal arm pinning him in place. No longer the soldier. Only, helplessly, himself, awake to what he had done and what he had lost.

_We’ll release you when you’re ready to comply, Soldat._

The cold and the hunger were intended to trigger hallucinations, too. Once a day they came back to try the code sequence, checking if the prolonged deprivations had reactivated his conditioning; instead, the code words served to burn the memories deeper into his cortex, brighter and more vivid each time.

_Are you ready to comply?_

It was like swimming to the oily surface of a nightmare. Memory clung to him, would not let him go. Everywhere in that room, the ghosts of his life, of what he could not have. Of Steve.

His flesh went pale, then blue in places. He saw this only because the hunger lent everything a hallucinatory clarity. He saw a man haloed in golden light after another failed activation attempt, making notes on his clipboard. An orderly nearby holding the syringe that he knows will bring relief.

_Are you ready to comply now?_

He begged for the shock treatment, for that pain, for erasure, futilely.

_He’s nearly ready._

They leave without giving him anything.

Another night chained, his blood slowing with the cold.

Someone must have been careless. It was the only explanation. There was a book of matches dropped near the door. Well out of reach, but still.

It was a more delicate matter to remove his prosthetic in those days — wires routed crudely into the flesh of his shoulder muscles, electrodes mapped onto a rib.

They were counting on this. (To keep him chained? Or to free himself?) They were counting on this.

They found him in the morning, the metal arm hanging from the pipe and Bucky across the room. A trail of blood leading to where the open wound of his shoulder and rib rested, congealing against the chill of the floorboards.

He was bloodied and starved, but he was warm, curled around the squat belly of the cast iron furnace now lit and burning the splintered remains of chairs and tables.

печь. _Pech_. The thing that kept him warm and alive: obedience.

He could have run. He could have escaped. (He tells himself this, now.)

No more will they use memories from his youth. When they find him curled around the heat of the stove, they know they have him in a new and better and more effective way. They use the killing cold and its one cure because to get warm means to choose to stay. To obey.

_Obedience_. Obedience will gain him the shock treatment to erase the pain, obedience will cure the ache of memory, obedience will let him forget about what he can’t have.

He made this choice. (He believes he made this choice.)

 

His therapist had that clever phrase about survivor’s guilt. He remembers the conversation so clearly and repeats it for Steve, as nearly as he can recall.

_You don’t have to drink the poison. The poison is not a promise you made in return for a half-lived life. Listen, no creature on earth—except for humans—ever chooses to die. We expect survival, we celebrate it; so how come in some circumstances we expect humans to do the opposite? We expect, what...the nobility of sacrifice from our flawed human selves? Sometimes it happens, sure, we can all name people who died fighting the good fight._ _Do you think for a second any of them didn’t hold on as long as they possibly could? You just held on a little bit longer. That’s its own sacrifice, in a way, I think. Choosing to live is not a simple thing._

No. But it wasn’t just survival, was it. He made a choice to agree.

_What does that mean to you, that you agreed?_ the therapist had asked.

It means everything that happened afterward was not an accident of fate but a part of his design. It means that in order to survive, he took down so many with him on the way. So many.

So many he could have saved, yet didn’t.

 

“What do you mean, saved? Who?”

“Nine of them...”

“The next trigger word?” Steve’s brow wrinkles in confusion. It’s nearing sunset now and a brilliant spill of crimson paints the scattered clouds on the horizon. The light falls on Steve’s face like fire. Bucky wishes he had something else to tell him, anything but this.

“Just...say it for me, Stevie, will you? I want to hear you say it before I tell you...maybe it’ll be easier that way.”

“Bucky—what do you—”

“ _Please_.”

“девять.” _Nine_. 

It scares a ghost of a feeling up his spine. A burst of color and agony, enough to stagger him with its force. Bucky can feel his breath go shallow as it sinks into him, _nine_ , and it takes every ounce of concentration to keep from falling completely into it.

“Hey, are you okay, Buck? If this is too much, you don’t have to...Jesus. Let me call your therapist or something....you look—we can stop. I’m going to—”

“No! No.” He shoots out a hand to snag Steve by the wrist, stopping him from getting up. He closes his eyes for a second and the fiery sunset looms a brighter red behind his eyelids. One breath, two. Looks back into those blue eyes as if the answer is hiding there. “Just...just give me a moment. I have to get through this.”

Skepticism lingers on Steve’s face but he doesn’t move except to twist his wrist gently out of Bucky’s grip, enough to clasp his hand. His skin against Bucky’s palm is warm and dry and real. Gentle and still, like when they would meditate together, or try.

The quiet between them rests, breath by breath, as Bucky tries to pick up the thread of his story. His reluctance is the shape of their clasped hands and the way he can feel Steve’s heartbeat in the thin skin near his wrist.

After another moment, one finger tracing the bones and knuckles of Bucky’s hand, Steve breaks the silence. “I know it’s not about—well. I know you said these ones are from when—your days with Hydra...but you know what I think about when I think about the number nine? I remember being nine years old in an alley in Brooklyn and that punk kid who jumped into a scrap with me, just when I was about to win. You remember?” The nostalgic look on Steve’s face is hesitant, though his fingers tracing along Bucky’s skin move slow and sure.

“‘Course I do. Except you were the punk, and you were losing. You never did know when to back down.”

“Still don’t,” Steve says quietly. His hand stills. “I wish that number was about—about us.”

“Us,” Bucky echoes.

It takes him a while to climb out of the reverie of what might have been and say, “Me too, Stevie. Me too.”

 

*

 

“I was trained to work with a team. A group of operatives, someplace far in the Soviet north. Strict secrecy. Strict mission protocols. We were only supposed to use numbers—no names. They must have been training us for something big—a coup, or a takeover—because we drilled in a facility mocked up to look like a government building...like a parliament, the Duma, or someplace in the Ukraine, who knows. Every day we drilled. Infiltrate, secure the floor, using different routes, at different times, in all weather, with different security barriers. With guns, without guns, with no weapons at all.

“At night we slept in a bunker under the facility. That alone was...unusual. New. By that era, they had a lot of safety measures to keep me in check. Whatever they were planning, it was important enough that they wanted me to trust these men, or for them to trust me. They had to be able to get me into position past some tricky obstacles. So perhaps they let things...relax, somewhat.

“They thought I was...the others knew I was different. They called me оруж when we were working. The Weapon. But not all the time. Sometimes at night they just said, hey you, вы. It was...enough. It was going to be a risky mission, too many loose ends to count. They didn’t know exactly what I was. But they trusted the parts of me they knew.

“I remember the man in the bunk next to me was Three, but somehow I also knew his name was Piotr. That should have been the first clue, maybe — names instead of numbers. Another man was Yeru, or maybe Yacub, number Four, he slept in the next row next to Two — that was Maxsim. Everyone knew Max’s name because it was the only way to wake him when he snored. That was the kind of thing no one talked about when...when we were working. There were...other names I knew. Alexey. Oleg. Oleg was so young...I don’t remember how I learned their names. I never spoke them out loud, but I knew them.

“The training facility was remote, resupplied once a week. Training was suspended and we were locked inside whenever the trucks unloaded. And then one week the trucks didn’t come at all. The place was oil heated and the tank ran dry a few days later. It got so cold, we broke out of the bunker and tried to fire up an old heating unit—a stove. A furnace. That someone found in the basement. They told me this later. We were...chopping up a bunch of...a bunch of old chairs and tables to burn.”

Steve swears softly, a sound Bucky registers only vaguely on the edge of his consciousness.

“It must have been around then that they discovered us in the basement. We knew there would be...consequences. I think we thought we would have locked ourselves back in before anyone found us. I don’t remember breaking my conditioning, but it must have happened then. There’s a blank in the middle. Next I remember, all of them—everyone from the squad, all nine of them—were tied up in front of me. Blindfolded. When I...when I broke down, I must have called—I said their names.” He swallows. “That’s what they told me, anyway.”

Steve is looking at him with that it’s-not-your-fault look and he can’t stand another second of it, so he plunges on even though the memory makes him sick.

“They asked me, did you tell them about the furnace, the _pech_. What else did you tell them, _Soldat_? They shot them point-blank, one at a time, while I watched and kept saying nothing, nothing. Ничего. I told them nothing. I knew, I _knew_ they just wanted to prove something. I had to convince them I had said nothing, revealed nothing, but also that these men did not matter to me, these nine men I had trained with over a month’s time and slowly come to know, to experience the smallest, barest shred of humanity with amid everything else that had been taken away.

“But the names, _their_ names, that was how it ended. Except what they wanted, what they really wanted, was for me to see I still had it in me. The obedient weapon, the animal without even a name, could still find comrades. And then lose them.

“The training went on for another six months, a year, I don’t know how long. New teams each time. And there were nine people they could take from me, and would, and did, every time I broke.”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, they didn’t always kill them. Sometimes they used them for the—to try to make new Winter Soldiers. For some reason, the new ones were never stable, never lived long, but they kept trying. I was their oldest, most resilient experiment. Their most lethal weapon. Whatever they had to sacrifice to keep me in the field was worth it. Even at the cost of an entire squad of trained operatives. Nine was—nine was so many.” His voice, after so long, cracks here. There is nothing more to say.

Bucky can see the question in Steve’s eyes. _How many times. How many gone_.

He looks away, stares blankly at the distant horizon. In the end, does the number matter? There’s no calculus that makes this right.

“Buck—” Steve reaches to touch him. Bucky pulls away before he gets the chance, stands up and has the wild urge to simply walk away, as if he can leave this story behind, now that the words are out of his mouth.

For everything they share, two men lost in time, this is the part where he knows their paths diverge. There’s no equivalency between himself and Steve. He feels it like a rot, deep in his bones. There’s no world in which this has a happy ending. There’s just telling Steve about it, here on this hillside, and seeing the knowledge of it settle between them like a sickness.

Bucky wipes the sick feeling from his lips and walks away before he can make it any worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> D:
> 
> (Gonna get worse before it gets better)
> 
> Here is a basic primer on survivor’s guilt if you’re curious or in need: [here](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empowerment-diary/201801/what-everybody-should-know-about-survivors-guilt). I tried to make the therapist’s dialogue as realistic as possible, though in my experience, this kind of “here’s how it is” monologue from a therapist is rare. I just figure it’s something Bucky really needed to talk about in depth, duh.
> 
> Also, [here](https://cals.arizona.edu/OALS/ALN/aln50/loflin.html) is a fascinating article about the difficulties of translating the nuances of indigenous words for African landscape and natural life, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
> 
> I took some liberties with the veldt landscape, borrowing some topography from the Tugela River gorge in South Africa as [inspiration](https://www.sa-venues.com/things-to-do/kwazulunatal/up-the-tugela-river-hike/).


	9. The Passenger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Benign and homecoming: one story about three missions, and one about being a ghost in your own city. 
> 
> There's only two days left before Steve has to leave and Bucky is both desperate to get through the words and unconvinced it's going to work at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No lie, this chapter went through about three versions (and my brain through an equal number of breakdowns) before I was able to get it into a final draft for posting, hence the delay. But I promised it before the end of August and hey presto! Here it is. Huge thanks again to my lovely beta @politikfic :D
> 
> Come find me on Tumblr at thatbluenote!

* * *

 

 

“Natasha—” Steve says, then stops, realizing he regretted the call before she even answered her phone. “I’m sorry to wake you. I just—I don’t—”

“Steve, it’s okay. Really. Tell me.” Her voice was quietly reassuring, though he felt incapable of conveying the scope of everything to her. “Do you need more time?” she asks into the silence when he hesitates again.

“No. Maybe. I’m not sure. He...he’s trying so hard, Nat. I just wish it was easier.”

A noncommittal sound from her, then silence. She has dropped enough hints over the years that Steve knows, out of all of them, she understands certain things about Bucky’s life better than anyone else. He also knows enough her well enough not to ask.

“How much does he remember?” she asks.

“Shuri says he should be able to remember almost everything. But some things the mind just...blanks out. To protect him, I guess,” he says. Steve thinks of his own time in the serum chamber. Thinks of so many moments, too bright and too close to the skin.

“It’s complicated. I get that.”

“Maybe it was a bad idea, though. He still remembers so many terrible things. God, the things they did to him over the years. You saw—you remember what he was like in that Hydra base with Zemo?”

“Yeah.” Her voice is barely audible over the hushed static on the satellite line. “When Zemo activated him.”

“I never knew hypnosis could be so brutal.”

“Steve, you don’t have to convince me,” she says after a long silence.

 

*

 

Frustration finally boils over in Steve after hours of Bucky avoiding him. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t sit together, wouldn’t even spar. Steve leaves for a run, desperate for some space to quiet his own thoughts. A fierce, hot wind scours across the hills. Parched by the time he returns, every drop of sweat evaporates right off of him and the village looks deserted, everyone having sought shelter in the huts.

Only after he pours an entire bucket of river-chilled water over his head to cool off does he bother looking for Bucky, who he finds lying on his bed in their hut, eyes open.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks quietly. “Do you want to keep going?”

Bucky only closes his eyes in pain. “You don’t really want that.”

Steve sees the man before him closing up tighter and tighter, like a wound pulled tight with scar tissue. “You’re not the only one who’s been changed, you know,” he says gently, searching for the right words. “It’s okay—”

“It doesn’t feel okay. Can Captain America be triggered by ten stupid phrases in a little red book? это пиздец. дерьмо́.” Steve doesn’t need a translation to know Bucky’s swearing.

“No, but neither can you.” Steve runs his hands through the mess of salt-soaked hair clinging to his scalp. “Not anymore. Isn’t that what this is about? You’re going to tell me the words, all the triggers, and then it will be done. Proof that you don’t work that way anymore.” His words are patient, but the feeling bubbling up in him is anything but. “Give me a reason why we shouldn’t just try them all in a row right now.”

Bucky’s eyes widen. “No. Not a good idea.” He sits up in the bed, restless.

“Why?” Steve watches Bucky open and close his mouth, as if trying to begin an answer to that question, before abandoning the attempt. So Steve tries again. “What would happen, exactly?”

“It might be too much...I mean, it might be okay, but what if—”

“No. We don’t have time to figure out every scenario here, Buck. We’re running out of time.” Words that are a punch in the gut to them both, and it takes a moment to recover. “I’m not going to torture you, Bucky.” He tries to pour every ounce of himself into those words, looking into Bucky’s face, tilted up to look at him, expression somewhere between helpless and furious. “Please. I just want to help. I’m not going to leave you alone in this.”

There’s a long, tense silence. A sob gathers up behind the words Steve really wants to say. _Don’t push me away._ When he can’t swallow the loneliness anymore, he sits down next to Bucky, leaning against the wall beside him and pressing his shoulder against Bucky’s in wordless need. Steve’s breath comes out jagged and uneven, and the sound of it seems to shift something between them. Bucky shifts a little and leans on Steve as much as Steve leans on him.

When he can bear to speak again, Steve tries something easier. “Tell me, what happens inside that head of yours?” Lets his clenched hand fall into a soft shape, brushing his knuckles against the outside of Bucky’s thigh so softly it could be a caress. “What happens when you hear the trigger?”

“I...don’t know how to explain it.” Steve doesn’t want to distract him, but he also can’t bear to break the contact between them. His hand rests in the space between them, touching Bucky so barely it might be no more than a millimeter of skin. “Like I want to be sick. Like I want to break something. Like I want to run.” His breath rushes faster in his chest as he thinks about it and then he clutches at Steve’s hand. “I can remember things from when they controlled me, but the trigger memories...there’s the memory they used to create the trigger, right there, clear as a bell, and then there’s the conditioning. What they wanted me to do. It’s like it’s trying to break through, trying to break me. But it’s weak.” He pauses, shakes his head a little to clear it. “Like the edges are smoothed over. I can push it down.” After a moment, he releases Steve’s hand and stands up. “I’m never certain if I’m just fooling myself.”

“Fooling yourself—?” Steve rises to follow him, taken aback by the sudden stormy look crossing Bucky’s face. “No, wait. After all the work you’ve done here?” His voice cracks with emotion and he catches Bucky gently by his bad shoulder, avoiding the scars but holding to the muscle just above, where all the tension gathers. “All of Shuri’s work, that was a trick too, I guess.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s just that...maybe I’m better, but maybe the trigger still works when the whole thing is done together. One or two words at a time, that’s different.”

“Then let’s try it,” he says as gently as he can manage with everything rushing through him, wanting to prove it to him, to explain, to reflect back even a small piece of what he sees. “All the words we’ve got. All the ones I know.” Bucky’s stories hover in his memory together with Steve’s own memories. He lets go of Bucky’s shoulder and stands close enough to reach him if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. Not yet. “Come on, why not?”

“I get what you’re trying to do. I don’t think it’s going to work.”

“Longing.”

“Steve—” Bucky scoffs, so Steve repeats it in Russian, quieter and a little closer to his ear, so he won’t mistake the sigh that follows, the sound of memory surfacing in Steve’s voice. Then Bucky holds perfectly still, listening.

“ _Rjaviyye_ .” _Rusted._ He lifts one hand to trace a finger along the rough stubble of Bucky’s cheek and down to the corner of his mouth. Steve remembers mud on the riverbank, remembers that cheek under his fingers, their skin soft and cold from the river water. Remembers want so thick and sweet in his veins that he thought he would die every time he saw Bucky walk toward him.

Steve remembers every story Bucky has told him. Every painful moment revealed, every word unearthed as carefully as unexploded ordnance. Steve practices the words in his head, in the dark, when he runs, whenever he gets a moment to himself, memorizing the unfamiliar syllables. They are the key. Somehow they kept Bucky alive all these years, so Steve speaks them with the quiet reverence of a prayer, an incantation.

“ _Semnadstadt_ .” _Seventeen_. He wants to capture those lips in a kiss, slow and sweet and careful, but he holds back, his breath suspended in his chest. When Bucky begin to turn to look at him, Steve knows he won’t be able to hold back, and they have further to go, so he takes a step back.

When he says, “ _Rassvet,_ ” _Dawn,_ Bucky’s breath is the quietest gasp between his lips and the tremble down his limbs is something warm and wanting.

Steve steps back again, leaving space clear for him to flee.  “Should I stop here?” he asks, his voice a hush.

Bucky’s blue eyes are soft, looking around himself for a moment as if the words themselves hover in the shadows. There is only silence, apart from the rustle of the wind in the trees outside, scattering cicadas from the trees, birds from their hollows. When he looks back up again to meet Steve’s look, his eyes widen with something like wonder, like tentative hope. “Keep going.”

“ _Pech_ .” _Furnace._ Steve’s breath goes shallow with how much he wants to kiss him, to burn everything else away but the fire between them. He holds still, watching this rare moment for the miracle it is.

“ _Devyeet_ .” _Nine_ , a prayer half-breathed and his voice gone rough as gravel. The silence between them thick with everything unspoken and poised to happen. And then for a second, for just a second, Steve thinks they can get away with this: “ _Dobroserdechnyy._ ” _Benign._

 

Bucky sways a half step, eyes wide in shock as all the sweetness drains away from him, the air pulled from his lungs. He tries, and for a second, that dull feeling seems like it will crest and then subside. But then that one step turns into two, and then he staggers out of the hut for air, feeling the word добросердечный dragging on him like an invisible weight that will not let go.

Steve follows him and snags Bucky’s elbow before he can go far, steadying him carefully. He holds Bucky just enough to keep him upright without any restraining force. “It’s okay. You’re okay, Bucky.”

Bucky doesn’t struggle, but he doesn’t relax, either. _Dobroserdechnyy,_ gentle and benign, mild, _Will you be good?_ Sweet as a lullaby, _dobroserdechnyy_ rolls off the tongue and sinks him like a stone.

Perhaps Steve can tell. Without a word, he rests one hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “Hey. Maybe you need to rest,” he says.

Bucky hesitates before following him. But it’s dark and familiar in the hut and he craves that feeling of safety. Steve eases him down onto one bed and sits across from him.

He should tell Steve to let it go, that this is all too much to attempt in a short time. Bucky should stop before he has to tell him anything more. He should tell Steve to go meet Natasha as soon as the sun rises. He should do a lot of things, but each one of them looms as impossible as the last.

“Tell me what you remember, Stevie,” he says instead.

Steve grins at the unexpected question, gives him a sideways glance. “I got so many memories, Buck. I could tell you so many stories. What do you want to hear?”

“You said once...the words reminded you of things, too. Tell me what one of them means to you.”

The grin fades only a little as he nods, understanding. After a careful pause, he begins. “Do you remember the winter after my mother died? When we lived in that little coldwater flat? My lungs kept acting up so bad, I couldn’t sleep some nights.” Bucky watches as Steve runs one palm across his sternum, remembering. “There’s some things I’ll never forget about life from...before the serum. That feeling of cold is one of them. So cold, like you’ll never get warm again.

“Some nights, though...we’d get back from some dance hall and you’d get confused. Drunk, I thought. If only I’d known,” he says with a chuckle. “You were like this big drunken puppy I had to take care of, falling all over me,” and Steve tip his head back in fond laughter. Bucky remembers it, too.

“You’d pull me down into the bed with you, and when I’d try to tuck you in and leave, you’d just say you couldn’t sleep with my cough driving you nuts all night long. Then you’d complain about my cold skin, and wrap me up so close...” In the quiet between them, Bucky hears how flimsy it sounds now, hiding the lie in the truth like that. Steve’s eyes are almost closed as he thinks back. “Your skin was the only place I ever felt warmth like that, back then. The only furnace I needed.”

Bucky wants to hold the memory in his mind the way Steve remembers it: feather-light and perfect, poor and young but carefree and huddled together under a thin wool blanket, still smelling Steve’s clove cigarette and the sweat of the dance floor under his collar. He remembers the way it was in Brooklyn, falling toward the slight, stooping shoulders of the boy he loved and could not speak the truth to, not yet, but whose delicate limbs he could clutch like a drowning man, late at night, under the cover of darkness and drunkenness and the sleep-worn familiarity of fondness. Bucky holding him closer every time the terrible sound of the cough wracked Steve’s body, thinking, _If I love you but I cannot have you, then I will save you_.

“I remember,” Bucky says, and tries to keep his voice from cracking.

“Do you know some nights I hardly slept, it felt so nice to be close to you like that?” Steve says in a bare murmur. He’s leaning forward now, closer to Bucky, and then he moves across to the other bed so they are side by side, and he pulls Bucky into his arms, pressing his chest flush against Bucky’s back in the darkness, spooning him so they can lay down together.

He is a solid wall of muscle and heat and safety and Bucky leans into it. He breathes somewhere near Bucky’s ear. “I missed this.” Steve’s palm smoothes along Bucky’s side with infinite care where the scars run into his ribcage and up to his shoulder. There’s a deadness behind the scar tissue there, but there’s also a shiver that runs through him at Steve’s touch, and a tightness in his musculature loosens for the first time in a long, long time.

“Just...keep going,” he manages to say, hoping Steve understands he means both. “Tell me more of what you remember.” He does not manage to breathe a word when Steve’s fingers reach up to brush back the tangled locks of his hair and stroke through the messy strands as he goes on telling Bucky about his memories.  

The time Steve helped Bucky get a splinter from the boardwalk out of his foot. Splurging a nickel each for coffee one frozen morning when Bucky got off shift at the trainyard. Finding the alley behind a club where the busboy always propped open the kitchen door, and they could sneak in and hear a good band playing on a Saturday night, dance with a wallflower girl or three in the waning hours.

Bucky can feel when Steve takes a deep breath of a sigh, thinking back on everything from their shared youth, his chest pressing into the muscles of Bucky’s shoulders. When he pulls Bucky deeper into his embrace it feels like the quietest, safest place. Like an anchor holding him in place. Otters floating in the water. Moonlit and muddy on the River Maas. Just him and Steve, forever, keeping warm.

Steve goes on talking like that for a long time. Until dawn, maybe. Until Bucky can hear only his own name repeated like a prayer, Steve’s fingers combing back his tangled hair, those arms wound around him like armor.

When he wakes, that warmth is still there. Steve is still pressed against him, buoying him up in the ocean of dark around them.

 

_Benign_ . Steve tries the sound of the Russian word again when Bucky asks him to, in the quiet of the morning. “ _Dobroserdechnyy_.” It sounds better when Bucky says it, though his lips curl around it in bitter memory. He closes his eyes when he says it.

“Hey. Come back.” Steve’s plea comes out almost a whisper. “Don’t disappear on me, Buck. Tell me what it means.”

“It means...calm. Benign. Gentle.” That earns him a disbelieving look.

“Not benign as in, a tumor? Thought maybe they’d made you sick in some way.”

“I was sick long before they got to me,” Bucky says, raising an eyebrow, but the joke dies on his lips after a moment. He’s stalling and they both know it.

Steve does not want to move from the quiet of the hut, the two of them close enough on the bed that he can gauge Bucky’s reactions through every small movement and shift of emotion. And Bucky, it seems, feels safe, too, judging from how deeply he slept, and how he gazes into the distance now, thinking back.

Laying one palm gently on Bucky’s forearm, Steve catches his eyes to make sure he understands. “Only if you’re ready.”

“No, I’m ready.”

“Tell me about gentle.”

 

*

 

Decades passed and he did not count, did not care. There were some who did, however. The Winter Soldier program, once the jewel of Soviet secret power, became a thorn in the side of certain bureaucrats.

— _Elements within SHIELD are aware of its existence. The Commander has orders from the Council of Ministers to deal with you. There are too many risks to continue harboring such a...volatile element._

— _Volatility is not the issue here. If the Commander thinks for one second..._

— _Don’t confuse me for someone who can do anything about. This is just a courtesy call. The Commander is already on his way to inform you of his decision. If you want to change his mind about the weapon, you had better be prepared._

Voices and conversation around him: he was awake, and then aware of the needle plunged into his arm. Waking him, burning through his blood with a painful jolt, then the stupefying haze of more drugs blanketing his nerves as he was led through a maze of hallways by a phalanx of armed soldiers.

By the time he entered the room, the perimeter of every light had begun to swim with traces of color whenever he moved his head. There must have been something different in what they’d given him, however, because despite feeling slowed, he could tell they also watched him like they expected a fight.

Except he felt like he had already been fighting. A soreness weighed down his limbs and he could not remember why. Everyone watched him closely, so closely. There was something he had to remember, and something he had to forget, and he had to keep the two separate. The prismed light around him refracted even these thoughts, scattering them so that each word no longer made sense. _Remember_. Remember what?

By habit, he looked at the weapons the soldiers carried. Uniforms can lie, this he knew all too well, but weapons are a more reliable gauge. Over the decades, this had granted him vague hints of the passage of time: kalashnikovs did not change much, but small arms revealed a few clues. He had noticed when wood grips fell out of favor, even if he did not know the year; he also noticed when the barrel bores narrowed, components taking on a darker, more polished look.

The guns revealed nothing new today. His jaw ached the way it did after they used the machine, and he could feel the burn of injection sites in his bicep.

The confusion — the haze of waking and not knowing — was as much a part of him as his metal arm. It was all he knew. Everything else was conjecture. (Was he ever otherwise? _Conjecture. Irrelevant to the mission, soldat_.) Like the soldiers flanking him right now: what did they know that they wouldn’t look him in the eye? (What did he know that he didn’t wish them to?) Like the man facing him, this uniformed stranger who carried himself with importance (too much ease in his posture, polished shoes, manicured nails): what did he expect? Everyone waited for this man to speak, and in the silence, the man simply stared.

— _Not volatile? Look at him. Hardly more than a parlor trick trained to hold a pistol. I’ve seen the files._

— _Sir, the results speak for themselves..._

— _Clearly. You’ve had to strengthen the conditioning God knows how many times. It’s taken a toll. Look at those eyes._

— _It is our position that the program is far too valuable to decommission. The effects of the conditioning, in our opinion, do not outweigh_ —

— _I’m not interested in your opinions. I am here for a demonstration._

In the strained silence that followed, he was aware of two things happening in exquisitely slow motion. One, the man in the lab coat stepped toward him with the small red book in his hands. Two, with smooth coordination, the soldiers around him moved back one pace into a firing stance and armed their weapons, aiming straight at his heart.

— _Certainly, Commander._

 

But that was later. He understood that only once Shuri’s treatment had straightened out the knotted tangle of his memory, when the scarred synapses had been had been carefully smoothed. However, that did not make it any easier to examine every strand of what had happened.

Because first there had been Tbilisi, Sofia, Grozny. First, there had been: _Mission report Grozny._

The penthouse in Grozny was supposed to be empty except for the target, he knew that much.

 

(— _Is he breaking?_ — _No, give him a minute._ )

 

One shot, fired true. As he checked the target for a pulse (none), an unexpected sound. A small shred of a gasp elsewhere in the room. A figure stirring in the splintered fragments of dark: he glimpsed a girl no more than sixteen. Something in her eyes belied the depths of what she knew, what it meant to witness a man like that being assassinated. In her stilettos and her dress shorter than it had to be, in the Grozny penthouse of a man like this. She knew enough.

The whites of her eyes flashing in the split second of her sprint. Before he could cross the room.

The window shattered around her. The rush of damp spring air chilled the room in a swirl.

A second of silence as she fell. The sound he recognized as fatal, upon impact. Spine-cracking, skull-splitting. A body on cement. A body that would not rise again.

 

_No_ —

 

The silk of her black dress was a crumpled dark flower on the cement below when he looked down. A wet stain spreading.

 

_No...no witnesses. Target eliminated._

— _Good. Now, then. Mission report on Sofia, Bulgaria, soldat._

 

A stain spreading: and dark red wine on a bedspread, on a carpet.

 

(— _See, what was that?_ — _It’s fine. Give him a second. The conditioning hasn’t broken in years._ )

 

A flash grenade to stun the target in his bedroom. He entered to find wine still running down from the shattered bottle of burgundy, along the white coverlet and onto the persian rug, pooling around the figure of a man—the wrong man.

Not the target, not the PM. A rival assassin, maybe; unconscious on the floor with a massive head wound, but alive.

It would take only one bullet to remove the threat of the man waking, he thought. He even stepped into the spreading pool of blood and wine, liquid red on red, intending to check the man’s pulse.

Up close he saw insignia on the man’s black sleeve. A stylized gray raptor. An eagle on a shield. He had seen it before, he thought.

It stopped him, that shield. Stirred something in him. But a muffled burst of sound elsewhere in the apartment reminded him that the target was on the move. He lingered on the face of the man with the shield; but the unconscious figure had not seen a face, so he left him there in the red puddle. Left him to be one more to spread the story of the ghost assassin.

Meanwhile, he could hear the target’s panicked footsteps echoing through the house. When the heavy outer door slammed open against the jamb, he knew he had to be quick. The shortest route to the street was through the window, so he leapt from the balcony to the street.

Sprinting to overtake the man, his boot prints a red-pink shadow following him until the wet residue faded. Until he finished what he came to do, before the target could escape to his waiting allies.

 

— _Target eliminated. No witnesses._

 

Not until the extraction point did he connect the wine-sweet smell following him everywhere to the moment standing above the black-clad man who lay stunned on the floor. The puddle of burgundy. The gray eagle on a shield.

In the back of a windowless van, he tried in vain to get the sticky residue off of his boots using a spare rag. Eventually he gave up the attempt and dropped the rag. It lay discarded, askew, crooked as the figure of the girl who leapt to her death.

The ones who weren’t supposed to be there.

 

— _Mission report, Tbilisi._

 

And then there were the ones who weren’t supposed to survive.

Some targets were too canny, were veterans of too many coup attempts, and posted an army’s worth of guards. There were some locations even the Winter Soldier could not breach, not when the target knew he was coming.

So when the target left the capitol to take command of the unrest in Abkhazia, he knew the mission was nearly complete. The separatists threatening the streets of Sukhumi would be a better cover than what he would find in Tbilisi. Amidst a shaky ceasefire, what would be one more casualty? The president would be an easy target in a skirmish.

His handlers had granted him enough autonomy to make decisions like this. Enough to pursue the fleeing target and maintain cover, rather than risk exposure and failure.

In Sukhumi, he would just be one sniper among many. One stray bullet.

He never got the chance. When he arrived, it was already too late. The city waited silent as a grave.

The ceasefire had not held. The separatists had overwhelmed the defenses. The target had fled and taken the army with him. The streets of Sukhumi were strewn with corpses, and not a soldier among them. A heap of mutilated women on one street, bloodied and bare from the waist down. The remains of a stone well, bodies half-pushed into its depths.

_Shevardnadze you abandoned Sukhumi,_ read the rough letters, painted in mixed Georgian and Russian script along the door of a still-smoking chapel. _Coward. Dog. Traitor._

He did not speak to those who huddled silent and still as death in the rubble. He knew what it meant, that silence.

This was no war. He knew a massacre when he saw one.

He returned to the capitol to find Shevardnadze. His target.

Yet every attempt ended in failure. Even a motorcade attack in the dead of night failed. His last effort, detonating crude explosives under the very floor of the parliament building, ended in a bloody collapse and smoking ruins; yet the target narrowly escaped. His face bloodied, his voice shaken, he spoke on the television screen.

_Terrorism._ The man’s voice a needle under his skin. Galling, insistent. Triumphant. _We do not forget. We do not give in._ The one who wasn’t supposed to survive.

The instructions to meet at the extraction point came mere hours later. In the chaos of the airlift, smoke drifted across the Tbilisi sky like in Sukhumi. On the wall in Sukhumi, he recalled, there had been a reminder, a curse. _Traitor. You said you would stay._ The target had escaped death at the cost of a building full of bureaucrats; at the cost of Sukhumi.

The smoke pursued him like a ghost, nagging at him. It was entirely possible the target had fled not because of a broken ceasefire, not because he was pursued by separatists, but because one lone assassin dogged his heels.

These were thoughts he could not afford. These were thoughts his scarred synapses were too weak to handle. These were thoughts that broke him.

 

— _Mission report, soldat. Mission report Tbilisi._

— _Come now, don’t harass him. It was all over the news._

— _It’s the protocol, I still have to record his answers._

The girl on the Grozny sidewalk. The man with the eagle on a shield. Every dull shuttered eye in Sukhumi. Gone, all gone.

_Target survived._

That face bloodied but alive on the television screen. _We do not forget_.

It was a hollow feeling in his gut before he processed what was happening. It’s in his mind and then it’s on his tongue, pouring forth: a howl, a keening, a sound born of desperation. As if noise alone could shut out what he remembered and what he was trying to forget and what he did not want to know about himself.

The sound was chaos, shaking him bodily. It was some time before he realized it was not merely inside himself but also all around him: a tumult of hands and limbs wrestled him to the ground. A syringe plunged into his bicep; a second syringe when the first had no effect.

— _There will be hell to pay._

— _We have to get him to the machine, idiot._ And then the door burst open, a dark figure appearing silhouetted against the hallway lights.

— _What’s going on? The Commander is nearly here._

— _He’s breaking, sir. We’re trying…_ A third syringe, and nothing.

The fourth syringe turned his limbs numb but every thought bright as flame. He craved the machine. Memory was a war inside him, a living purgatory. A deep well of the dead. _Please._ A fifth syringe, filled and plunged in rapid order, the room brighter again. A terrible brightness, cast across everything he would not, could never look away from.

— _We need you to behave for the Commander, soldat._

_Please. Do it._ His voice ruined from the strain of grief and howling. _Make me forget_ . The smoking ruins of the chapel, _You said you would stay_ in slashing, vivid paint. A reminder. A curse. _Dog. Traitor._

— _Speak up. Soldat! This is your last chance._

Tbilisi. _Sukhumi_ . The target. So many. _The girl._ Those he killed. Those who survived.

— _Will you do it? Will you be good? Will you show him you can be gentle?_

добросердечный. _Benign._

_Yes._

Finally they dragged him to the machine. The bright blade of pain exploded through him — electric, impossible convulsion, both alive and dying. Everything that breaks him had to go into that word, _benign_. Every last piece of it. The machine went on and on and on.

 

In front of the uniformed stranger (the Commander, he knows, though he did not remember being told), it wasn’t until the white-coated man with the red book got to _Pech_ , furnace, that the quiet ache in his body built to a numbing, pulsating paralysis.

— _Devyyt_ , nine. A stillness held him like death, and he could not move; every other person in the room seemingly fought for calm, nerves on high alert as sweat poured down the back of his neck. Nine kalashnikovs and three pistols were pointed at his heart, his head.

— _Dobroserdechnyy._ Benign.

No one moved. Least of all him.

Broken, alive.

He who should not have survived.

_Ready to comply._

— _See, Commander? As gentle as a lamb._

 

Steve brings them bowls of stew from the midday cookfire when Bucky finishes. Wrung out like a rag from so much talking, Bucky leans against the outside wall of their hut and they eat together in the shade. Hours have passed without them noticing. The dirt is cool and soft against his bare feet, fine as silt.

They eat in silence. It takes him a moment to realize how intensely spicy the stew is, and then Steve takes Bucky’s hand and opens it up, dropping something into his palm. A handful of small, dusky fruit the size of olives.

“Look what I found. Remember these?” Steve chuckles and bites one of the tiny efor tree plums in half, and the juice stains his lips exactly the way Bucky remembers from the night market. Those lips that drive him a little crazy when he looks too long. “God, that was a crazy night.”

Bucky puts down his food, half unfinished. There are only two nights left before Steve leaves, and in the silence between them, Bucky knows they are both thinking about it. When he looks up, Steve watches him, expectant but quiet, gentle.

_The poison and the goddamn antidote._ A shiver passes through Bucky for a moment before he gathers his thoughts and begins again.

 

*

 

The target, pinpointed in his rifle scope, was dead before the boat reached the shore, a mission that would have been unremarkable if it had not been for what happened next: no one met him at the extraction point.

He retraced his steps, convinced he had been compromised. They must be waiting for him to finish something, some task left undone. He found no witnesses, no traces of his own presence, nothing to indicate a reason for the unsettling absence of contact at the extraction point.

Ghosting the route between where he had been and where he was supposed to be, back and forth, at all hours. Nothing.

After two days, hunger caught up with him. Restless, he paced a wide perimeter around the route, scanning the streets until he found something that he did not even know he was looking for. He saw it, the battered metal cart on a street corner shaded by a yellow and blue umbrella that read _Sabrett Hot Dogs We’re On A Roll!_

The taste of it was heaven. Tomorrow, he thought, he will ask for sauerkraut and mustard.

“Buddy, your change. Hey!” The man called out when he was already several steps away. When he thanked the man, his own voice was hesitant. Gravelly with disuse. He should have kept silent because it made the vendor squint against the light to look at him closer. “You from around here?”

The question spooked him. The man looked speculatively at his clothing, his carefully featureless rucksack, but especially at his face, as if he recognized him. Too many questions to answer, not the kind of questions a ghost could afford. So without thinking about it, he nodded and melted back into the city. Wherever “around here” was. It was Brooklyn, though he did not know it.

Yet he did know that there were blocks that looked too shiny, too many buildings of polished glass that looked wrong. (Compared to what?) Then there was a roofline that he swore he knew, though he had not passed it before on the mission. A brownstone stoop. A line of fire escapes that he knew used to be strung thick with laundry every day. How did he know that? It seeped into him, knowledge unaccounted for, knowledge deeper than a mission briefing, deeper than his bones. He spent a long time walking, wandering, trying out strange-familiar words in his mouth. Roosevelt Avenue. Canarsie. Fulton, Dekalb, Schermerhorn.

When the extraction finally came, they heard it in his voice. A relaxed tone, not one of recognition, but of something just out of reach and maybe beginning to trickle back.

— _Listen to that. Back to his roots, this one._

— _You enjoy your little vacation, soldat?_

He answered in the wrong language, maybe. After that, there was a new addition to his mission kit. A mask like a muzzle. This was his homecoming: silenced like an animal.

— _That was never your home, soldat. This is your home._ The needle, the jolt of electricity. The uneven thrill of painful guilt going numb as forgetfulness slid over him, reclaiming the dregs of memory that had washed ashore while he walked the streets of Brooklyn, lost but finding something with every step.

“Repatriation, they called it. возвращение на родину.” _Vozvrashcheniye na rodinu,_ the syllables flow off Bucky’s tongue with the barest hint of sarcasm. “Back to the homeland.” By now the wind has chased them inside and they lie together, side by side. Bucky’s brief laughter is dry and without humor. Even in the low light of the hut Steve can see the grimace that crosses his face with pain. “The only homeland I could remember back then, anyway.”

Steve burns like he always does when this wry mood comes over Bucky; a physical pain tightens everything inside Steve with desperation and clarity. He knows he was still frozen in those years and could not have done anything to help the man wandering the streets of Brooklyn; he knows the country they once fought for is a new, complicated landscape and there is nothing simple about _home_ anymore. And yet.

“No,” Steve says.

“No—what?”

“They can’t have you.” He shakes his head, rejecting the notion out of hand. He captures Bucky’s hand in his own. “They never had you.”

“Maybe.” Bucky’s eyes are far away. “There were times it was like being a passenger in my own brain. A part of you watches…a part of you looks away.”

“A part of you never left.”

“Maybe a part of me will never come back, either.”

“Hey. Hey, look at me,” Steve insists, pulling him closer, staring into the dark ocean of those blue eyes. “I want to tell you something that someone once told me. It doesn’t matter if that part of you never comes back. Well, it matters, but not the way you think. It doesn’t weaken you. It makes you understand the world better than someone who’s just gonna bash their way through everything with no regard for the consequences. You understand the consequences. You understand the need for compassion.” He wraps Bucky close to him, inhaling the familiar scent of him and hoping he understands this. It’s the same thing that Steve holds onto when the world turns dark—the idea that the strength he has been given comes with this twinned sense of consequence, of balance. He clings to Bucky like he can keep him from tipping over into that darkness again.

“You’ve been to hell and back so many times, you know about consequences better than anybody,” Steve says finally. “But listen. You can leave whatever you like in the past, you can lose parts of yourself...they took what they took, but no matter what you had to leave behind, a part of you also came back. You’re here. You survived. Nothing can change that.”

Bucky has no answer to that, but in his silence and in the quiet of their bodies pressed together and safe, Steve feels a kind of acceptance from him. For a long time they lie together, wrapped up in each other and in their own thoughts, until sleep finally overtakes them.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some historical inspiration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s#Assassinations, and especially  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhumi_massacre


	10. Back to One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He looks at what memory shows him. He looks.
> 
> (Maybe he has never stopped looking.)
> 
> He looks at the memory, torn and piecemeal, of when he fell from one life and into another, alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been a long time coming, I know. Thanks for still reading, friends!

* * *

  
  


A restless wind rattles the tree branches and the drying grasses all around, a scattering, skittering whisper in the dark. No sunrise for another hour yet. Steve sleeps and Bucky lies in his bed, sleepless. Listening. 

An ozone burn of far-off lightning ghosts in from the storm clouds massing over the valley, their vast purple-black anvils just visible through the curtains. He waits, wanting to hear  when the rain arrives to soak the land. Any moment now.

When the storm started to blow in, Bucky had already been awake. He’s used to his own restlessness, bored with the patterns of his own mind. After an hour, he’s tried meditation. He even tried the muscle relaxation exercises he learned in Birnin Zana, the first techniques his therapist had helped him master in the early days. For all the confusion, the push-pull of his unbearably slow recovery, he has to admit that things are better. The nightmares are fading, and lately, sometimes even absent. The adrenaline shading into panic that used to be his driving force, barely harnessed from moment to moment, now ebbs, a phantom current underneath his skin, sending a twitch along his muscles now and again.

It’s a vast improvement. 

It’s not nearly enough.

Steve, still asleep next to him, has not accepted it yet. Bucky knows he has one more day to explain it to him. 

One more day. It’s not enough. But when Steve wakes, he will try. He has to.

 

*

 

These, he knows, are not even full memories. By accident or by design, what his mind shows him of the hours, days, weeks after falling from the train only flash in and out of clarity, fitful glimpses, unreliable and shifting even after all the treatments.  _ Why bother at all _ , he told the therapist.

_ If the memory is there, you must need it _ , had come the response.  _ By definition, those memories are part of you. You must choose to look at them.  _

 

*

 

So he looks at what memory shows him. He looks.

 

(Maybe he has never stopped looking.)

 

He looks at the memory, torn and piecemeal, of when he fell from one life and into another, alone.

 

*

 

First, there had been waking. In a blinding white place, piercing cold, lungs emptied of everything except shock for a moment before the blooming, the  _ drowning— _

The bloom of a pain so intense it was a suffocating wave, pushing him under before he could even breach the surface. He fled into unconsciousness.

  
  


Then later, a gray, in-between place. Filled with a high, roaring sound far away, and an animal noise somewhere too close by for comfort. A sickening lurch of pain that meant he was in danger _ — _

The gray in-between never lasted long enough for him to understand it; waves of pain, waves of dreamless dark overtook him. Then the roaring sound above, waking him, and the animal sounds grating against his ears, the remembering _ — _ ah  _ God, broken— _ and then darkness again.

 

(Later, he thought the animal noise had been his own voice, pleading and wordless. He did not like to think it. The self, the voice from  _ before _ , even if only in some broken way.)

 

Then, darkness. Darkness and deep silence. 

_ Dead _ , he thought at first; though thinking it, he knew that was wrong. The pain was gone  _ — _ no, abated. Numbed. His left arm lay pinned somehow, unresponsive; a nerveless shock warning him not to try to move it a second time.

Gradually, his eyes adjusted. Dulled and confined, he could not remember what else there should be besides this: an arched vault of bricks above. A hard cot beneath him. Light at certain hours that was so dim it could have been a reflection of a reflection, a ghost of a ghost. 

A tomb. A place to be forgotten, perhaps. Or a place to forget  _ — _ but what? It nagged at him, sharp little teeth of phantom memory. He did not know the what or where or why. He only knew he was not supposed to be here, he was supposed to be  _ — _ but that thought cracked open and lay empty, unfinished. Unfinishable. Until _ — _

 

_ —Your arm, soldat. Forged anew.  _

This was much later. Still in the dark cell. A place where he came to depend upon the dull swaddling of his mind and his body in a cotton-wool fog, the regular drip of a burning cold drug into his veins. 

This was the place where his missing arm became a fact, a dull reality like everything else. Like his name, gone. Like his memories, gone. Like his will. All gone. 

The prosthetic, fitted, dragged at his flesh.  _ —Stand, soldat.  _ He did,  unquestioning. The weight of the metal thing unbalanced him and in that moment, that dull equilibrium fell away, the wrongness sparking something in him that had lain sleeping. Did he realize his arm was gone? Until the sharp, utilitarian geometry of the prosthetic became a weight, pulling and dragging and setting off numb little shocks in the flesh of his raw shoulder, he did not know fully. Nausea surged within him, bile rose up in his gorge.

_ —This is not...I’m supposed to be— _

Then came the injection, and the machine. The shocks of erasure. Another try. 

_ —Stand, soldat.  _

They were perfecting the technique of control, of waking him, of putting him back under. Each time it failed they tried again. Another dose, another waking, another eruption from dullness to stumbling confusion, rising dread. Dullness to disturbed pleading. 

_ —Wrong, soldat. Wrong again. Increase the dose. _

A sinking feeling in his gut as the needle approached. A thread of instinct, resistance, something he was meant to do in dire situations: name, rank, number. A faint, disembodied instruction:  _ If you should be captured, certain rights are guaranteed to you. _

Everything was gone from him, but the number  _ — _ maybe. He grasped at it. He followed instinct. It started with an easy number. The first number _ — _

Erasure. 

Awaking to the dull place again.  _ —Stand, soldat.  _

And the heavy-forged weapon where his arm should have been. And nausea: dullness giving way to a shrieking, unbalanced wrongness. 

Dullness giving way to begging for his own name. And then erasure, again. And again. So many times.

  
  


Eventually they perfected the dose, the machine. The freezing and unfreezing and activation and all the neural erasure and scarring necessary to control the perfect weapon.

Or almost perfect.

A weapon that sometimes came to a stuttering, shrieking halt, overcome by the weight of missions completed or not, of deaths wrought not by will but by unnatural command. 

A weapon in need of a sequence of words in a small red book: codes burnt deep into the cortex to leash him tightly to their use. 

Longing. Rust. Seventeen. Dawn. Stove. Nine. Benign. Homecoming. Decades of this, muzzled and compliant, mission-ready, before he broke again.

  
  


That next time he broke, it was the nearest he ever came to retrieving his name. 

  
  


He returned from a successful assignment: a car in the countryside had to be intercepted on motorcycle. A briefcase retrieved, two targets eliminated, a man and a woman: the mission was executed flawlessly. Suspiciously easy. An uneasy paranoia settled in his gut when it was finished.

And the base of operations hummed with nervous energy, on high alert upon his return. Hallways crowded with more people than usual, and not all of them in the familiar uniform, either. The briefcase was taken away so quickly it was as if he was an afterthought. 

_ —Take him to the old quarters. We can’t risk cryo processing while High Command is here. _

Guards followed down a dark stairwell to the sub-basement. An entire floor with its air gone stale and musty with disuse and dry rot. They stationed four guards at the door, leaving him in darkness. 

Only the strangely familiar sight of the arched brick vault above and a tired metal cot, its ticking half-sprung and threadbare. They had taken his mask and his ammunition, but not his weapon. He tore off a corner of the cot’s covering to clean it and did so slowly to fill the time, until the arm was fully oiled and silent, the joints gliding seamlessly. 

Hours passed. He exercised in the narrow space until he grew tired, an ache nagging him about the need for sustenance; he knew he would not sleep, waiting for processing, but he laid down anyway.

Restless, he worried at the fraying threads where he had torn off a piece of the cot’s covering to clean his weapon. The entire mattress was decaying, threads disintegrating under his fingers.

Except for something that did not. Some texture that did not belong  _ — _ like this whole off-kilter mission. Restless, he idly dug into the half-decayed stuffing, following the incongruous line of hard cotton stuck there, until suddenly it loosened and came free in his palm.

It had been a dark khaki green once. The corner of something stiffened with machine embroidery, chopped up and recycled into stuffing.

A name patch. White threads stitched and curved where once a word had begun. All that remained now was one letter, the threads almost all pulled away, leaving just enough to be legible:  _ B _ . 

He  _ reeled _ . What fought its way to the surface of his memory, clawing, desperate, fragile as eggshell? What sound. What word. What was it. He clattered inside the darkness of himself, louder and louder with it, unable to keep quiet.  _ What word. What name. _

They came for him then, High Command be damned.  _ —Why all this fuss, soldat? Stop this racket. We can’t have you spoiling this, not when we are so close. _

Grating, desperate, like trying to breathe through blood, like trying to heave up a poison swallowed deep. What was it? What name? This was not the heady, sickening rush of his conditioning rupturing, grief dawning,  _ This has happened before— _

He knew what came next, the burning drug and the machine to erase him. He only had moments left, but he did not care. Something hovered, waited. Something he needed.  _ No, it’s there—almost there—  _

The door to the cell burst open and floodlights pierced the dark, blinding him, yet he held still, remembering. Or trying to.

He remembered falling. Falling from _ — _ no. It clouded over, hazed and painful. He only remembered falling, and the white-out of pain, the gray darkness and dullness that came after. It flashed through him, again and again, but no word, no name came to him.

_ —You don’t even know what you’ve forgotten, do you? _

A swarm of handlers and guards surrounded his cot. He moved then, fighting. Not yet, not when this unnameable  _ thing  _ was so close.

The fraying patch clutched in his good fist, he fought against them. Something about that white stitching _ — _ a name _ — _ if he only had time _ — _

_ —Do you have the syringe? _

_ —Doctor, his arm...We are having trouble keeping him still… _

A moment longer and he knew he would have grasped something more, something beyond the frustrating blur of old, unreliable memories.

They would not give him a moment. They would not even give him breath, a handler on each limb and an orderly reaching for a chokehold. 

_ What name? _ Nothing. But then: a thread of memory. Falling, and awaking in a dark place, a place like this one. An arm affixed to him for the first time, not sleek and silent but monstrous, brutal. Heavy with wrongness. 

A bursting shock of memory, painful and then gone:  _ —Name, rank, number _ , he recited numbly, but the name was gone to him. The number? The  _ first  _ number.  _ —One _ , he managed, gasping against the arm choking him, the room going dim around him.

_ —That’s not even the right language.  _ Muffled laughter as bruising fingers pinioned him in place, prised the prosthetic roughly from his shoulder.  _ —Get the higher dose.  _

The needle slid in too fast to fight.

The burn of the drug calmed his limbs, stopped his movements, and as always it sharpened everything into a hallucinatory glow, the moment before erasure when everything loomed bright enough to sear: that number, the absence of that name, echoed through him.  _ B.  _ One... He tried to cling to it. They were speaking a series of words to him, words that stirred things in him, painful and raw and terrifying. It calmed nothing, erased nothing, activated nothing. They jabbed in another syringe. Everything tight and piercingly clear, agony. They dragged him to the machine. The sudden static sound of voltage, the ticking of diodes, the crackling of that terrible energy waited for him.

He had nothing left. He had found nothing in his memory. And he was going to lose it all over again.  

_ —I am… _

_ —Ty  _ nyshto _ , soldat. You are nothing. Dose him again—you know what you are, soldat? Do you know what you were, before we picked you up? Nothing but rubbish. A broken, useless thing. Half dead in a ravine. Did you think your friends would come pick up their trash? You think they are coming for you, after all this time? _

He had been, yes, forgotten. (By whom?) Left behind. He had fallen from one life. It hovered there, waiting to be found, in that memory of falling, alone.

_ —Ya _ … It was all he could manage.  _ I am... _

_ —What are you?  _ This with the threat of a muzzle pressed tightly under his chin. 

_ — _ _ Odin… _ . One _.  _ Right language, wrong word. He corrected it before the click of the hammer could fall.  _ — _ _ Odinochka _ _.  _

_ The only one.  _

The only one of his kind. Alone.

This was close enough.  _ —Da, soldat. Yes.  _ They slid in the mouthpiece, and they turned up the voltage, and he greeted it.

  
  


*

  
  


Bucky, after telling this all to Steve, feels nothing of the rain’s chill descending all around the hut. A familiar numbness settles in his limbs _ — _ as if, in dredging up the wreckage from the depths, the abyss itself takes residence inside him. Cold and unmoving. 

_ You think they are coming for you, after all this time?  _

He has regained his name, since then. He read his service number in a file. He has delved into these fragments of falling, waking, in order to dredge out the poison, to loosen the scar tissue in which everything from  _ before  _ became embedded. 

He has regained so much. 

But this part, this piece of himself: the Bucky who woke up in pain, the Bucky who lost his own name, the nameless man, one-armed, in a dark underground place, left alone. The Bucky who was left behind, whose very aloneness defined him? The acknowledgement of this weighty betrayal is one he is glad to have left almost to the last.

This part is not  _ Look what I have done _ . Not even  _ Look what I need forgiven.  _ This part is  _ Look what you did not do.  _ And  _ Why did no one come for me.  _

He shifts against the thin pillow cushioning his back. “So that’s  _ One _ . For what it’s worth.”

A long silence passes between them. 

Chewing the corner of his lip, Steve starts to speak, “Buck…”

“No, save it. I know what you’re going to say.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. You were frozen. Lost. Whatever. I know it wasn’t you not...looking. Or whatever. I know they held your funeral without a body, just like they held mine.”

“Missing in action, presumed dead,” Steve recites the official line ironically.

Bucky nods, not looking him in the eye. “Exactly. So don’t tell me you would’ve been there, you would’ve _ — _ whatever. Gone looking. It’s the last goddamn thing I want to hear.”

Steve’s eyes widen. “You idiot, if I hadn’t _ — _ ”

“If, if, if,” Bucky interrupts him. After the words he’s had to unearth today, in the last waning twenty-four hours before Steve has to leave Wakanda, it’s too much. 

But Steve won’t leave it alone.

“Yeah, if. If you’d just  _ listen,  _ Buck...if I’d been awake, sure I would’ve started the goddamn search and rescue myself. I would’ve gone AWOL with our guys, if I had to. You know I was on ice, I was as good as dead. I couldn’t search for shit. But listen, Buck.  _ They did _ .”

A wary glance. “Did what? Who?”

“The Army. They looked for you.”

It shocks him to his core. “No...” He tries to read anything except the sincerity written plainly on Steve’s face. “No, they never _ — _ ”

“You think you were the only one? Buck, there were thousands missing in action. Did you think you got left behind _ — _ what, on accident?” His voice breaks a little. Anguish softening, Steve continues. “They didn’t have anyone left from our unit who could pinpoint exactly where it happened. Those mountains were steep. Treacherous. You have to understand _ — _ no, don’t make that face. It isn’t an excuse. I’m not...you think I’m just saying this to make you feel better? Listen, let me explain something to you. You think I got pulled out of that glacier and cozied up with Fury and Tony and them and just...moved on? No, Buck. No.” His eyes are wide and bright and tender with righteousness. “I had to look it all up. The records were hard to find, but I wasn’t going to let some messy database stop me. You know you were on the priority M.I.A. list for decades? Decades, Buck. They sent squads to check every single report of unidentified remains, all through the Alpine region. And everywhere else, for that matter. When they woke me up, when I got my feet under me, I spent more time than I’d like to admit just combing the catalogues of unidentified remains for a clue, anything  _ — _ I thought if I could just find something in the dental records, something in the scars  _ — _ anything that might be you. Even though they told me it was useless.” He stopped and chuckled briefly, mournfully. “Fury knew, I think. Long before anyone sighted you on a mission. He knew you were the Winter Soldier.”

“How?”

The planes of Steve’s face are softened in the gray, rainy light. His mouth moves, smiling so briefly it’s gone almost before it registers. “Educated guess? He had access to classified stuff. Way above my clearance level...but in any case, he’s smart. He knew I’d never agree to the Avengers if I thought you were still out there.” He stops, looking over at Bucky. “He must have known, even back then, how slim a chance we had at getting you back. And he also knew I wouldn’t care.” He smirks. “And he was right.”

The old lie echoes in Bucky’s mind.  _ You think they are coming for you, after all this time?  _ And he remembers something else: all those hushed conversations and negotiations taking place between Steve and those he left behind when he brought Bucky to Wakanda. When they were on the plane, he remembers, he had realized the kinds of bridges Steve had to burn, to bring him back from the dead, and to try to save him. To try to keep him  _ alive _ . 

  
  


*

  
  


Steve takes his nerves for a run in the late evening, once the storm has cleared the valley. It still seems surreal that he will be leaving tomorrow, and that he still hasn’t been able to convince Bucky to leave with him. He follows the curving ridge of the dry cully way out to where the hills dip down to the green river. Steve peers down into the swimming hole where they had come with the shepherd boys. It is deep and murky after the rains, debris clinging to the rocks. A chorus of frogs slows down, tracking his approach, then growing louder again as he jogs past, heading back.

Bucky waits for him outside the hut, eyes on the duffel Steve has left outside the door, packed and ready. He looks relaxed, his hair dripping wet after washing. He is draped in one of the traditional red wraps from the hill tribe he’s taken to wearing lately.

“Nearly time, now,” Bucky says, his eyes on the bag. 

“It doesn’t have to be.”

This startles something in Bucky, though he gives only a wary nod. “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about...when we started this. About testing the whole sequence, I mean.”

Steve tries to read the hesitation on Bucky’s face. “Changed your mind, then?”

“No! No.” His eyes, wide, fix intently on Steve’s. “We have to do the whole thing. I still...need to know.”

“You don’t have to prove anything. You know that, right?” It still disturbs Steve, this thread of uncertainty in Bucky, this idea that the treatment will have failed, in the end. It makes Steve wonder if he is himself being naive. He ducks inside to sit down on the bed, changing his shirt and using it as an excuse to avoid Bucky’s eyes again, still. “T’Challa will destroy that little book, if we ask him to. Shuri’s protocol has already done most of the work and you’ve...you’ve come so far.”

“You sound so sure,” Bucky says. Like he’s still only one step removed from brainwashing. Steve can’t  _ stand  _ it. 

“I am sure. I’ll burn that red book myself, if I have to.”

Bucky wipes his palm on the folds of his robe and drops heavily onto the bed next to him. “Forget about the book. Destroying the book doesn’t...it doesn’t defuse the bomb. There could be copies...or _ — _ hell, someone could...I dunno, torture you and get the activation sequence.” 

“Ah, quit sweet-talkin’ me, Buck.” He jogs one knee sideways on the bed to knock into Bucky’s thigh. “Can’t a guy just make a promise and skip the details?” After doing it once, he leaves his leg pressed into Bucky’s, letting that warmth linger like all the other promises hovering unspoken between them. “Besides, it wouldn’t work. I know it.”

Bucky hums roughly, a noncommittal sound, disaffected.

For the last week, every time Steve has tried to let a tenderness take hold, tried to close the space between them, Bucky has pulled away, eyes distant, every muscle gone rigid with something that isn’t rejection so much as it is resignation. Like he’s watching Steve from a distance too great to cross. 

Steve understands a little bit about what it means that he is leaving Wakanda in less than twenty-four hours, leaving Bucky to his own devices. It means Bucky withdraws into this careful shell of himself, this place where he does not let anything touch him, least of all Steve. But some things can cross that border. 

“I know the words won’t work,” he repeats. “Let me show you.  _ Longing _ .” He says the Russian word very quietly, very gently, though he cannot keep the slight quaver of hesitation from his voice, not completely. 

And Bucky reaches out, grabbing and holding Steve’s leg as if he thinks he will disappear just then. A desperate tremor in the force of his grip. For one long, stifled minute, Steve waits, the word hovering between them like a magnetic force. But Bucky says nothing, only holds onto Steve and does not breathe. 

Steve waits silently for the moment when Bucky’s eyes meet his again: an expectant, wordless plea.

“ _ Rusted _ .”

“Steve _ — _ ” a breath rushing out of Bucky, a whisper. Too much and not enough.

Like a wave it travels all the way up through him until Steve feels it like a grip around his heart. He’s sick with want, and wrung out with the silence, the careful lines of what he is and isn’t allowed. He turns a little, facing Bucky fully now, and reaches up with one hand, using his fingers to paint those familiar cheekbones and the rough stubble of his chin with invisible clay, just like that day on the River Maas. Along the soft arch of his eyebrow. The little hollow at his temple, where Steve can see his pulse flutter. How had they gone from nothing to something, from silent meditation in Birnin Zana to the quiet touch of fingertips on skin, to  _ dawn _ , that drowning moment of a kiss, to this new silence, this wall of stone between them? Steve will break it down, so gently it will crumble like sand.

Steve moves his fingers, tracing, saving Bucky’s mouth for last. He traces every other familiar curve of Bucky’s profile before dropping one finger to the softness of those lips.

“ _ Seventeen _ ,” he says, the unfamiliar syllables on his palate feeling utterly unlike the sweetness the word conjures in English. In his own tongue,  _ seventeen  _ is nothing but a scrawny, lovesick kid with a death wish and a crush on his best friend, who was maybe not quite so oblivious after all. 

Bucky’s lips part only a little, hot breath stirring against Steve’s hand.

Maybe Bucky is just as sick of trying to figure it out as Steve is. He captures Bucky’s hand and uses it to pull him close, curving the other hand around the nape of his neck. Their foreheads touch for a moment, the space between them taut. “ _ Dawn. _ ” Steve buries his nose in Bucky’s hair, the long damp strands curling around him: a faint scent of the river silt. He smells like everything good, everything Steve wants. 

They are twined together now, so close Steve can practically taste his skin. The peril of asking _Can I kiss you?_ or _Is this okay?_ is the lack of answers waiting. _Yes_ this is okay _—_ this is everything they’ve ever wanted. And yet _No_ , because everything in the world is strange and wrong ever since Bucky fell from one life into another, ever since they were parted, and frozen, and changed.

So Steve accepts no answer at all, only takes Bucky’s kiss with his own, stealing the soft breath there. It breaks something open between them, fierce and soft and wanting, an avalanche of open-mouthed need. Steve finds the soft place under Bucky’s jaw where he wants to bury himself forever, kisses it like swooning; feels the ache of a groan under his teeth. That groan breaks into a panting breath.

“Keep...keep going,” Bucky manages, a whispered plea, wonder and want mixing.

There’s nothing Steve won’t give him, nothing he would deny him. He pushes the cloth of the red robe away, seeking the heat of his bare skin. The scent of the river is everywhere when Steve tastes him, desperate to hold onto the thread of what he is supposed to be doing; he grinds out, “ _ Furnace _ ” near Bucky’s ear. A wordless, high sound of pleasure in Bucky’s throat as the syllable hits him.

He maps the scars across Bucky’s bad shoulder with his mouth, kissing everywhere he can find. Writhing against each other, kiss-drunk _.  _

Steve kisses him once, twice, stealing short little breaths, sips of oxygen. Savors the muscle of the body beneath him and the short breaths heaving Bucky’s chest as he grips Steve around the waist and grinds up into him. In the half-light, Bucky’s eyes are huge and black and drinking him in. 

Steve has to keep going, though he fears everything will be over when he gets to the end. A slow line of perfect, chaste kisses, one two three, from navel all the way up his chest, four five six, and finally up the vulnerable sinews of his neck. Bucky holds nearly still, waiting: seven, eight kisses, until Steve is hovering above those lips again. Bucky waits, mouth open.

“ _ Nine, _ ” he speaks softly, before Bucky surges upward to take his mouth.

Only this. Only the sounds he can coax from Bucky as his hands and mouth worship him. He is fast losing control, wanting too much, so he holds him down for a second, making him wait again. Something sparks, answering fire in Bucky’s blue eyes when he’s held there, touched bur not quite enough, played like an instrument. Steve waits for the moment when something breaks within him, a moan, a sharp need, a begging.

When he cannot hold back any longer, “ _ Benign _ ” is a prayer of worship, hands dipping down to find his hard length, and “ _ Homecoming _ ” is a needful sound that ripples between them, between each searing kiss. 

Bucky, cheeks pinked and lips swollen, manages in a neat twist of his hips to tumble them over, landing Steve beneath him with a look of supreme satisfaction. Chin tilted up as he gazes down at Steve, withholding his mouth for a moment as he evaluates him; Steve grips his thighs in need, pressing into him, against him. “Please,” he finally begs. 

“Say it,” Bucky hisses in sharp pleasure, gripping his cock and Steve’s in his palm together, stroking. “ _ Say it _ .”

The universe tilts, gravity pulls in the direction of Bucky. Steve waits, panting hard, until everything holds at the tipping point _ — _ “ _ One _ ,” he says a second before they come, first Steve and Bucky seconds later with a shout, come spilling double over the top of his fingers onto Steve, their fluids mixing. He collapses down half on top of him, heavy and sweet with sweat, languid. 

“One,” Bucky repeats, quiet, his lids heavy, caressing the smooth skin at Steve’s hip, their legs entangled.

Steve has no response, only the fond, sudden ache in his chest that says  _ You must make him understand what this means  _ and also the sharper thought,  _ Leave him here tomorrow and you will die _ , so he can only gather Bucky tighter into his arms and stay there, breathing their combined scent and listening to the evening insects singing in the trees outside, for as long as he possibly can.   
  
  
  


* * *

 

_ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who else is ready to cry their eyes out in approximately (checks watch) 22 days and 10 hours? D: D: D:
> 
> Note about Bucky’s service number: it’s given in the CA:TFA script as starting with 32, a prefix that indicates he was drafted; there’s some debate about whether he’s canonically a draftee or an enlistee (as specified in the Smithsonian exhibit in CATWS). I’ve gone with the service number starting with ‘12’, indicating that he enlisted post-Pearl Harbor in NY, which also fit with the slotting-together of the activation code 'one' and his memory of being alone after the fall. I originally found the debate about his serial here: http://danahid.tumblr.com/post/118371860424/what-is-buckys-actual-serial-number-ive-seen-it


End file.
